Live by Night Quotes

“What you put out into the world will always come back for you.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“The foundation of your life is luck. Hard work and talent make up the difference.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“What's your name?"
"Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?"
"Wanted."
"By all the girls or just the law?”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“Things weren’t ever what they were supposed to be; they were what they were, and that was the simple truth of it, a truth that didn’t change just because you wanted it to.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“We live by night and dance fast so grass can't grow under our feet. That's our creed.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“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.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he'd pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“Confidence you haven't earned always has the brightest glow.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“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.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“I don’t believe he casts people into eternal flame for fornication, as you pointed out. Or for believing in a version of him that is a little off the mark. I believe—or, I want to believe—he considers the worst sins to be those we commit in his name.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“Plans are just dreams until they're executed.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“Achievement? Depends on luck—to be born in the right place at the right time and be of the right color. To live long enough to be in the right place at the right time to make one’s fortune. Yes, yes, hard work and talent make up the difference. They are crucial, and you know I’d never argue different. But the foundation of all lives is luck. Good or bad. Luck is life and life is luck. And it’s leaking from the moment it lands in your hand.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“Another thing Tim was fond of saying was when a house falls down, the first termite to bite into it is just as much to blame as the last. Joe didn't get that one--the first termite would be long fucking dead by the time the last termite got his teeth into the wood. Wouldn't he? Every time Tim made the analogy, Joe resolved to look into termite life expectancy, but then he'd forget to do it until the next time Tim brought it up, usually when he was drunk and there was a lull in the conversation, and everyone at the table would get the same look on their faces: What is it with Tim and the fucking termites already?”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“My father's gone," Joe said eventually. "Emma's dead. Your brother's dead. My brothers scattered. Shit, D, you're one of the only people I know anymore. I lose you, who the fuck am I?”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father's pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things. “I get off at midnight,” she said.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“People were lost and people were scared and their lynch ropes couldn't reach bankers or stockbrokers, so they looked for targets closer to home.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“What’s it about?” Danny seemed authentically curious.
“The night. It’s got its own set of rules.”
“Day’s got rules too.”
“Oh, I know,” Joe said, “but I don’t like them.” They stared through the mesh at each other for a long time.
“I don’t understand,” Danny said softly.
“I know you don’t,” Joe said. “You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy’s leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there’s a difference, like the banker’s just doing his job but the loan shark’s a criminal. I like the loan shark because he doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be sitting where I’m sitting right now. I’m not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men’s club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid’s grades. Die at my desk, and they’ll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt’s hit the coffin.”
“But that’s life,” Danny said.
“That’s a life. You want to play by their rules? Go ahead. But I say their rules are bullshit. I say there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“Growing up, Joe had adored his brother, Then he'd come to hate him. Now, he mostly didn't think about him. When he did, he had to admit, he missed his laugh.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“She had that light about her that turned people around her into moths.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“We all believe lies that bring us more comfort than the truth.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“We’re not our brother’s keeper, Joseph. In fact, it’s an insult to our brother to presume he can’t take care of himself.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“Soon as he sat down, Joe saw it in his face clear as a stream - fear. It lived back behind his eyes, leaked out of his pores. Most people didn't see it because they mistook its public faces - hatred and ill temper - for rage. But Joe had studied it for two years in Charlestown, and he'd discovered that the worst of the men in there were also the most terrified - terrified of being found out as cowards or, worse, victims, themselves, of other terrible and terrified men.”
― Dennis Lehane (Author), Live by Night

“What I’ve learned is that violence procreates. And the children your violence produces will return to you as savage, mindless things. You won’t recognize them as yours, but they’ll recognize you. They’ll mark you as deserving of their punishment.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“Vice, he realized, was Depression-proof.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“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.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“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 moments themselves.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“God was not some white-robed cloud king prone to sentimental meddling in human affairs. He was the iron that formed its core, and the fire in the belly of the blast furnaces that ran for a hundred years. God was the law of iron and the law of fire. God was nature and nature was God. There could not be one without the other.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“they had become the people her parents worked for. But they were better versions. And her parents, hungry as they were, would have expected no less. You couldn’t fight the Haves. The only thing you could do was become them to such a degree that they came to you for what they had not.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

“His father was gone. He was no longer a son. He was a man without history or expectation. A blank slate, beholden to none. He felt like a pilgrim who’d pushed off from the shore of a homeland he’d never see again, crossed a black sea under a black sky, and landed in the new world, which waited, unformed, as if it had always been waiting. For him. To give the country a name, to remake it in his image so it could espouse his values and export them across the globe.”
― Dennis Lehane, Live by Night