Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Dennis Lehane
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: August 4
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dorchester
Massachusetts
Dark
Precise
Lord
Innocence
Evocation
Lost
Broke
Mister
Death
Across
Daniel
Beautiful
Sweet
Spare
Remember
Coming
Spares
Heart
Since
Flies
Written
Masterpiece

More quotes by Dennis Lehane

Image
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
Image
I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.
Dennis Lehane
Image
Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?
Dennis Lehane
Image
I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I'm awful - my handicap is about six or seven thousand.
Dennis Lehane
Image
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
Image
Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don’t think they can become men
Dennis Lehane
Image
Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.
Dennis Lehane
Image
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
Image
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.
Dennis Lehane
Image
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
Image
Or maybe I'd do what I always do - hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.
Dennis Lehane
Image
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
Image
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.
Dennis Lehane
Image
Grief, I swear to God, doesn't live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can't smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.
Dennis Lehane
Image
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.
Dennis Lehane
Image
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
Image
He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.
Dennis Lehane
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.
Dennis Lehane