Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.

— Dennis Lehane

Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him.

— Dennis Lehane

That's the thing about being a victim; you start to think it'll happen to you on a regular basis. It's living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.

— Dennis Lehane

The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.

— Dennis Lehane

There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.

— Dennis Lehane

There's always a 'she'. Isn't there?

— Dennis Lehane

The sound of her breathing reminded me, as it so often did, of how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable we were because of how much we loved her. The fear - that something could happen to her at any moment, something I'd be helpless to stop - had become so omnipresent in my life that I sometimes pictured it growing, like a third arm, out of the center of my chest.

— Dennis Lehane

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.

— Dennis Lehane

We all know who you are, Mr. Coughlin. Famous Yankee gangster. Friend of the colonel. It would be safer for a man to swim into the middle of the ocean and cut his own throat than to threaten you.' He solemnly made the sign of the cross. 'But when people starve and have nowhere to go, where would you have them end up?' 'Not on my land,' Joe said.' But it is not your land. It's God's. You are renting it. This rum? This life?' He patted his chest. 'We are all just renting from God.

— Dennis Lehane

We live in a world of disposable memory, nothing's built to last, not even shame.

— Dennis Lehane