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556ac41
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It had occurred to Sean once - on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical - that maybe they HAD gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they'd become if they ever escaped and grew up.
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Dennis Lehane |
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192451e
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How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?
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violence
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Dennis Lehane |
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38468af
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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.
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Dennis Lehane |
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db483b2
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My daughter squealed again and both Bubba and I winced. It's not an attractive sound, that. It's high-pitched and it enters your ear canals like hot glass. No matter how much I love my daughter, I will never love her squealing. Or maybe I will. Maybe I do. Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can't remember when a block of it didn't rest on top of ..
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Dennis Lehane |
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b04bc30
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Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.
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Dennis Lehane |
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eb7afd2
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Those who did remember probably shrugged off the chill of her memory, turned their heads down to the sports page or up toward the approaching bus. The world is a terrible place, they thought. Bad things happen every day. My bus is late.
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Dennis Lehane |
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6c50428
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You ever think how the most minor decision can change the entire direction of your life? Like, say you miss your bus one morning, so you buy that second cup of coffee, buy a scratch ticket while you're at it. The scratch ticket hits. Suddenly you don't have to take the bus anymore. You drive to work in a Lincoln. But you get in a car crash and die. All because you missed your bus one day. I'm just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in ..
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life
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Dennis Lehane |
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13be4ab
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Do you know the primary difference between men and gods? ... Gods don't think they can become men
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men
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Dennis Lehane |
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0746b48
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You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.
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Dennis Lehane |
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f48e305
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L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.
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Dennis Lehane |
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4768679
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Grief, he said, is carnivorous.
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Dennis Lehane |
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19353d2
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I think if a man beats you and fucks half the women he sees and no one will help you, axing him isn't the least understandable thing you can do.
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Dennis Lehane |
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24712e6
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I know you. I've known you my whole life. I've been waiting. Waiting for you to make an appearance. Waiting all these years. I knew you in the womb.
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Dennis Lehane |
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7a07ca6
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People don't fix each other, Joseph. And they never become anything but what they've always been.
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Dennis Lehane |
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d41429c
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I've built something valuable here. But valuable things also have a way of being misunderstood in their own time. Everyone wants a quick fix. We're tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old day back, and we don't even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress.
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Dennis Lehane |
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f375163
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He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn't just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you'd fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had.
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Dennis Lehane |
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e2c7523
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He'd told his son recently that life was luck. But life, he'd come to realize as he aged, was also memory. The recollection of moments often proved richer than the moment themselves.
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Dennis Lehane |
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73baedf
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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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Dennis Lehane |
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d960f6e
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I'm just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.
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Dennis Lehane |
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5f9f53b
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Dave put his head down and ate his eggs. He heard his mother leave the kitchen, humming Old MacDonald all the way down the hall. Standing in the yard now, knuckles aching, he could hear it too. Old MacDonald had a farm. And everything was hunky-dory on it. You farmed and tilled and reaped and sowed and everything was just fucking great. Everyone got along, even the chickens and the cows, and no one needed to talk about anything, because not..
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Dennis Lehane |
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5ede7f9
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Everyone wants a quick fix. We're tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old days back, and we don't even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress.
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Dennis Lehane |
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625f58f
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This woman was hard-core. Fuck with her at your peril.
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Dennis Lehane |
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816ba57
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Monsters don't dress like monsters; they dress like humans. Even stranger, they rarely know they're the monsters.
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Dennis Lehane |
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b06d14b
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What's your name?" "Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?" "Wanted." "By all the girls or just the law?"
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humor
gangsters
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Dennis Lehane |
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e29be42
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We live by night and dance fast so grass can't grow under our feet. That's our creed.
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Dennis Lehane |
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d5c05e7
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Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.
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sacred
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Dennis Lehane |
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f8a91e2
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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.
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mourning
grief
depression
family
friendship
professional
the-past
melancholy
reflection
regret
remember
dead
sad
lost
mental-illness
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Dennis Lehane |
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c8bd38f
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Those eyes, Teddy thought. Even frozen in time, they howled. You wanted to climb inside the picture and say, 'No, no, no. It's okay, it's okay. Sssh.' You wanted to hold her until the shakes stopped, tell her that everything would be all right.
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Dennis Lehane |
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5aedf45
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You don't have a partner, Marshal, You came here alone.
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Dennis Lehane |
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2214883
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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.
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Dennis Lehane |
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4a0c87b
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When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe's answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn't a gangster, he was an outlaw; (b) he came from a magnificent house not a magnificent home.
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gangsters
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Dennis Lehane |
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a6191c1
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This was the photograph, I knew, that had already burned its way into my dreams and my shadows, into that part of my mind that I have no control over. Its image would reappear in all its wanton cruelty for the rest of my life, particularly when I was least prepared for it.
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Dennis Lehane |
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441f8af
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It was the lack of a clear reason that got to her most, & it stabbed her that a relationship that had once seemed unbreakable could slip apart so easily due to nothing more than time, family turmoil, & growth spurts.
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Dennis Lehane |
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99042ee
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My blessings outweigh my regrets.
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Dennis Lehane |
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820b856
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The trick, Teddy had long since learned, was to stay busy and stay focused. They couldn't catch you if you didn't stop running.
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Dennis Lehane |
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08cd83a
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The mind...It's an engine essentially. That's what it is. A very delicate, intricate motor. And it's got all these pieces, all these gears and bolts and hinges. And we don't even know what half of them do. But if just one gear slips, just one...Have you thought about that? It's just like a car. No different. One gear slips, one bolt cracks, and the whole system goes haywire. Can you live knowing that?" He tapped his temple. "That it's all t..
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Dennis Lehane |
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a995a86
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you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into their energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to.
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living
honoring-the-dead
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Dennis Lehane |
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e4aff6c
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scarred by wisdom she'd never asked for.
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Dennis Lehane |
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0a4b113
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After my daughter was born, I'd considered buying a shotgun to ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as I listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language, I thought of buying the same shotgun to blow my own fucking head off.
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Dennis Lehane |
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2c47751
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He looked back at the page, got one last glimpse before the match blew itself out. Going to find you today, Andrew. If I don't owe Dolores my life, I owe her that much, at least. Going to find you. Going to kill you dead.
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Dennis Lehane |
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6677bbf
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We are not special. We are lit from within by a single candle flame and when that flame is blown out and all light leaves our eyes it is the same as if we never existed at all. We don't own our life. We rent it.
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Dennis Lehane |
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4214551
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We met when we were both majoring in Space Invaders with a Pub Etiquette minor at the Happy Harbor Campus of UMass/Boston.
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Dennis Lehane |
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67c4b91
|
You heard me. Let someone else send you to your blaze of glory. You're a speck, man. You're nothing. You're not worth the bullet or the mark on my soul for taking you out." You trying to piss me off again, Patrick?" He removed Campbell Rawson from his shoulder and held him aloft. I tilted my wrist so the cylinder fell into my palm, shrugged. "You're a joke, Gerry. I'm just calling it like I see it." That so?" Absolutely." I met his hard eye..
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Dennis Lehane |
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af3b402
|
You didn't die and go to a better place; this was the better place because you weren't dead. Heaven wasn't in the clouds; it was the air in your lungs.
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Dennis Lehane |