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I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.

Dennis Lehane

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Dennis Lehane
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: August 4
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dorchester
Massachusetts
Make
Working
Tied
Things
Society
Immigrants
World
Father
Rage
Keep
Watching
Didn
Struggle
Place
Happen
Happens
Seeing
Modeled
Way
Class
Immigrant

More quotes by 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.
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Chuck said, “Hey. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Cawley looked over at him. “I’ll bite. How many?” “Fish,” Chuck said and let loose a bright bark of a laugh.
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The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.
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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.
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Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J.P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?...Gods don't think they can become men.
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But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.
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I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.
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.
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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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Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?
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.
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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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What molds us is what maims us.
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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Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?'
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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We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.
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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He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.
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