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
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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.

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