Small Mercies Quotes

“Race don’t come into it. They keep us fighting among ourselves like dogs for table scraps so we won’t catch them making off with the feast.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“He glances sideways once, catches her glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“Call them gooks, call them niggers, call them kikes, micks, spics, wops, or frogs, call them whatever you want as long as you call them something—anything—that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That’s the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“They keep us fighting among ourselves like dogs for table scraps so we won’t catch them making off with the feast.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“The worst of us has good in him. The best of us has pure fucking evil in his heart. We battle. It’s all we can do.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“You raised a child who thought hating people because God made them a different shade of skin was okay. You allowed that hate. You probably fostered it. And your little child and her racist friends, who were all raised by racist parents just like you, were sent out into the world like little fucking hand grenades of hate and stupidity”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“Bobby is struck by the notion that something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t be unbreakable. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable. The paradox scares the shit out of Bobby. He’s met people over the course of his life who he truly believes existed as the ancient shamans did, with one foot in each world: this one and the one beyond. When you meet these people, it’s best to give them breadth the length of a football field, or else they may suck you right into that next world with them when they go.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“She’s only forty-two, which, okay, when she was twelve seemed like one foot over the threshold into God’s waiting room, but now, living it, is an age that makes her feel no different than she always has. She’s twelve, she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time. But she isn’t aging. Not in her heart. Not in her mind’s eye”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“Because truth hurts, truth costs, truth upends your world.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“That’s what ghosts are—they’re testaments to what never should have happened and must be fixed before their spirits leave this world.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“We’re not one thing. We’re people. The worst of us has good in him. The best of us has pure fucking evil in his heart. We battle. It’s all we can do.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“I told you, Detective Coyne, that you can’t take everything from someone. You have to leave them something. A crumb. A goldfish. Something to protect. Something to live for. Because if you don’t do that, what in God’s name do you have left to bargain with?”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“Change, for those who don't have a say in it, feels like a pretty word for death. Death to what you want, death to whatever plans you've been making, death to the life you've always known.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“what scares him about all intelligent women—that she’s smart enough to see, very quickly, how completely full of shit he is.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“G’bless. They could add it to the list that includes It is what it is and Whatta ya gonna do. Phrases that provide comfort by removing the speaker’s power. Phrases that say it’s all up to someone else, you’re blameless. Blameless, sure, but powerless too.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“They’re poor because there’s a limited amount of good luck in this world, and they’ve never been given any. If it doesn’t fall from the sky and land on you, doesn’t find you when it wakes up every morning and goes looking for someone to attach itself to, there isn’t a damn thing you can do. There are way more people in the world than there is luck, so you’re either in the right place at the right time at the very second luck shows up, for once and nevermore. Or you aren’t. In which case . . . Shit happens. It is what it is. Whatta ya gonna do.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“in Southie, most kids came out of the womb clutching a Schlitz and a pack of Luckies.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“You’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“He's a tall, elegant man. Mary Pat has met him several times over the years and has always been struck by his mix of deference and gravity. Now what strikes her, even from the back of the church, is the unreachable despair in his eyes. It's not the despair of the hopeless, it's the despair of the forsaken. The first is weakness, the second is a knife blade. Those who quit are victims, but those who are abandoned grow vengeful.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“I can’t protect you. I can do what I can, teach you as much as I know. But if I’m not there when the world comes to take its bite—and even if I am—there’s no guarantee I can stop it. I can love you, I can support you, but I can’t keep you safe. And that scares the ever-living shit out of me. Every day, every minute, every breath.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“But they also weren’t racists. Something about the idea of it—the pure irrationality of it—offended them. They didn’t think black people were necessarily good, don’t get me wrong, they just thought everyone—regardless of what color they were—was probably an asshole. And to say you were less of an asshole because your skin was lighter was reprehensible to them. It just made you a bigger asshole.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“Several of the major weapons companies have been sending urban police departments amped-up military-grade weapons for years. New law enforcement philosophies coming out of L.A. and New York have begun to advocate for special teams of combat-ready police cells. In L.A., the first of these has been given a name, SWAT, and they took on the Black Panthers and the SLA in sustained firefights that armchair John Waynes love to believe put the order back in law and order. In reality, Bobby knows, those gunfights led to limited results, a shitload of property damage, and a new micro-generation of substandard cops who think they can compensate for bad instincts, poor people skills, and limited intelligence with high-powered weaponry.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“No matter what we claim in public, in private we all know that the only law and the only god is money. If you have enough of it, you don’t have to suffer consequences and you don’t have to suffer for your ideals, you just foist them on someone else and feel good about the nobility of your intentions.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“And where is that community for her? By this point, she knows the gossip has to be all over the neighborhood—no one has seen Jules Fennessy in six days. Word will also be out that it’s best no one ask about her either. So everyone knows, as she does, that her daughter is dead. But no one visits. No one checks in.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“Brendan is, simply put, a wonderful individual. Nine years old and he’s thoughtful, empathetic, profoundly curious, funny as fuck, and warm. It’s as if he somehow inherited the best traits of his blood relatives but none of their damage.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“They only like the sermons that scare them; they mistrust any that appeal to their empathy.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies