Quotes from Gone, Baby, Gone

Dennis Lehane ·  412 pages

Rating: (28.8K votes)


“When I was young, I asked my priest how to get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God told His children;'You are sheep among wolves, be wise as the serpent, yet innocent as doves.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone


“You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone


“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.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone


“Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone


“Love like that? Hell, it seems so pure, it's damn near criminal.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone



“When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people—relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print—create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task.

“But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed.

“It’s a silence that’s different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.

“The silence of the dead says, Goodbye.

“The silence of the missing says, Find me.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone


“As far as I could see, she didn't take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they'd been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I'd never solve - like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone


“and two men standing up top, weeping like children because they’d somehow never known the world could get this bad.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone


“This is America . . . where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone


“Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone



“Without me, that girl will be gone. Gone-gone. You understand? Gone, baby, gone,' he sang.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone


About the author

Dennis Lehane
Born place: in Dorchester, Boston, Massachusetts, The United States
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Because life is more than the shoes your feet are in. More than the person you are. It's the togetherness. The parts of yourself in another. Memories and walls and cupboards and drawers with compartments for cutlery, so you know where everything is.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from Britt-Marie Was Here


“The more instances we examine, and the more care we employ, the more assurance shall we acquire, that the enumeration, which we form from the whole, is complete and entire.”
― David Hume, quote from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding


“Everyone has that moment, I think, the moment when something so...momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, quote from Girl in Pieces


“In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in others, being optimistic, being frank with everyone about everything. And then, as one comes to understand things and people better, to develop a sense of irony. The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony. But”
― Julian Barnes, quote from The Noise of Time


“Hot waves started to wash all over my body. And I yielded to his sweet touch.”
― Sharlyn G. Branson, quote from Limits of Destiny


Interesting books

The Cat in the Hat
(331.2K)
The Cat in the Hat
by Dr. Seuss
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
(1.9M)
Harry Potter and the...
by J.K. Rowling
Fight Club
(410.2K)
Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk
Holes
(817.1K)
Holes
by Louis Sachar
Watchmen
(432.3K)
Watchmen
by Alan Moore
The Divine Comedy
(93.8K)
The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.