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

“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

“irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Because truth hurts, truth costs, truth upends your 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

“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

“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

“But how come it’s always the poor who are expected to eat the food that’s good for them no matter how it tastes?”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“Y se dice que tal vez lo contrario al odio no sea el amor, sino la esperanza. Porque el odio tarda años en construirse, mientras que la esperanza puede aparecer a la vuelta de la esquina cuando ni siquiera estás viendo hacia allí.”
― Dennis Lehane, Golpe de gracia

“dunno, it looks like a place gods would choose to go on vacation.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

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

“But he knew they were really dead because they were in the way. Of profit. Of philosophy. Of a worldview that said rules apply only to the people who aren't in charge of making them.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“Standing there, taking her in, he gets a sudden whiff of her utter solitude, Of the series of traumas, big and small, that's passed for her life.”
― 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

“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 May Pat Fennessy, broken by unbreakable. The paradox scares the shit out of Bobby.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“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.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

“I’m not afraid to die, she tells those buildings, the room, God. Not even a little bit. Then what are you afraid of? Living in a world without her.”
― 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

“Now, standing in front of Carmen Davenport’s building, holding both her hands by the fingers as she tells him she had a nice night and he agrees that he did too and they both smile goofily and wonder if they should try another kiss, he realizes that what scares him about her is what scares him about all intelligent women—that she’s smart enough to see, very quickly, how completely full of shit he is. He doesn’t know what he’s doing; never did. Doesn’t know where he’s going; never had a clue. He feels, at his essence, that he is a baby who was dropped by a stork and is still falling toward a chimney. Everything else he shows to the world is costume.”
― Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies