Quote

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

Dennis Lehane

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Dennis Lehane
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: August 4
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dorchester
Massachusetts
Language
Lifting
Making
Prose
Believe
Deeply
Capable
Highest
Level
Levels
Symphonic
Words
Primacy

More quotes by Dennis Lehane

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Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become men
Dennis Lehane
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Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It's a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well... Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they're also the first forms of protection I ever knew.
Dennis Lehane
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I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.
Dennis Lehane
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Or maybe I'd do what I always do - hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.
Dennis Lehane
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How am I supposed to let you go, that's all I'm asking. I want to hold you again, smell you, and, yes too, I just want you to fade. To please, please fade.
Dennis Lehane
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Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?
Dennis Lehane
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I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus, they suck the life right out of a party.
Dennis Lehane
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Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there's another family and that's the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they're as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don't have to look out for you and they don't have to love you. They choose to.
Dennis Lehane
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Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.
Dennis Lehane
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He wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you'd been born for only one moment and this, for whatever reason, was it.
Dennis Lehane
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It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.
Dennis Lehane
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... scarred by wisdom she'd never asked for.
Dennis Lehane
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I was blessed to grow up in really interesting times and to go back to a home where I was very safe.
Dennis Lehane
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Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.
Dennis Lehane
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She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who’d been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.
Dennis Lehane
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I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.
Dennis Lehane
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Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.
Dennis Lehane
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The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.
Dennis Lehane
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How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “I don’t know. How many?” “Eight.” “Why?” “Oh, stop overanalyzing it.
Dennis Lehane
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I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.
Dennis Lehane