Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their "Amen's" and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he’d get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face.

— Dennis Lehane

Maybe honor was in its twilight. Maybe it had always been heading that way. Or worse, maybe it had always been an illusion.

— Dennis Lehane

Maybe that's what love is-counting the bandages until someone says, 'Enough'.

— Dennis Lehane

Men. If you give them half a chance, they'll fuck you over just to prove they can.

— Dennis Lehane

Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.

— Dennis Lehane

One that society can't forgive, but I can.

— Dennis Lehane

Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in small town USA. 'It’s like a homepage without a scroll button?

— Dennis Lehane

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

— Dennis Lehane

She told him that he had the most beautiful voice she'd ever heard, that it sounded like whiskey and wood smoke.

— Dennis Lehane

Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we'd shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we'd had and those selves we'd been been gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you'd never read again.

— Dennis Lehane