Mystic River Quotes

"There is no street with mute stones and no house without echoes."

"Don't be thinking about going to your mother on this one. She never wants you to see Jimmy again after that stunt today."

"He's just wild, and your mother's had her fill of wild in her life."

"It wasn't for the wink of surprised pride he'd seen in the old man's eyes when he'd picked it up. Fuck that. Fuck him."

"Sean would miss it. Jimmy took the glove and he felt good about it. Sean would miss it."

"That's how he felt about Dave. Maybe Sean, right now, was feeling that way about his baseball glove, standing over the empty space on the floor where it had been, knowing, beyond logic, that it was never, ever, coming back."

"Damaged goods. That's what Jimmy's father had said to his mother last night: 'Even if they find him alive, the kid's damaged goods. Never be the same.'"

"Jimmy, sitting on the curb, was eleven years old, but he didn't feel it anymore. He felt old. Old as his parents, old as this street."

"Brendan Harris loved Katie Marcus like crazy, loved her like movie love, with an orchestra booming through his blood and flooding his ears."

"In the real world, beauty was like a fence to keep you out, back you off."

"Once a month, Celeste and three of her coworkers at Ozma's Hair Design got together at Dave and Celeste Boyle's apartment to read one another's tarot cards, drink a lot of wine, and cook something they'd never tried before."

"He allowed himself the indulgence of wondering what those two matching yups would look like at the other end of the barrel, and he smiled."

"Win for me. Win for my kids. Win for my marriage so I can carry your winning back to the car with me and sit in the glow of it with my family as we drive back toward our otherwise winless lives."

"I will not dream anymore, you said. I will not set myself up for the pain. But then your team made the playoffs, or you saw a movie, or a billboard glowing dusky orange and advertising Aruba, or a girl who bore more than a passing resemblance to a woman you'd dated in high school danced above you with shimmering eyes, and you said, fuck it, let's dream just one more time."

"There's what you get—if you're lucky—in this life, and it ain't much in the first place."

"Your whole life, you wished for something like this. You told yourself you didn't, but you did. To be involved in a drama."

"Hurting someone... makes you feel alone. It makes you feel alien."

"All of them were weary but convivial and wired, too, emitting an aura of intense relief, as if they'd just walked off the same battlefield together, muddy, bloody, but erect and unmaimed."

"Still, if she'd met a guy with movie-star looks and city-boy charm... Jimmy wasn't so far removed from nineteen himself that he couldn't remember what that was like."

"He'd tidied the aisles, restocked dairy, and was replenishing the doughnut and pastry trays when the bell clanged, and he looked over to see Brendan Harris and his little brother, Silent Ray, walk past the counter and head for the small square of aisles."

"But no one was so dumb as to try to rob a store on the East Bucky Flats/Point line with his thirteen-year-old mute brother in tow."

"Brendan had that quality; you sensed he understood people a little too well, and that the knowledge made him nervous."

"He thought of that Lauren and wished he could just climb back into the tunnel of that dream and pull it over his head, disappear."

"A lot of people are nice. It's not the same thing."

"I see you with Ray or your mother and even everyday people on the street, and you're just so kind, Brendan."

"Back in Jimmy's time, the parents would have stepped out of the crowd, yanked the two off the ground by their hair, swatted their asses, and whispered promises for more into their ears before dropping them back down."

"Jimmy put his arm around her, pulled her tight, wishing you could freeze moments in your life like snapshots, just stay in them, suspended, until you were ready to come out again, however many hours or days that might take."

"Of course, the room the two girls shared turned into a cyclone of discarded clothing, but Jimmy didn't mind—Katie was helping the girls mark yet another event, using the tricks Jimmy had taught her to make even the most minor things seem major and singular."

"Jimmy smiled and nodded and squeezed back. Annabeth, with her psychic reads of him, her well-placed hand squeezes, her tender practicality, was Jimmy's foundation, plain and simple."

"He'd wake up scared—scared Katie had managed to roll over wrong in her sleep at night and smother herself, scared the economy would continue cycling downward until he was out of a job, scared Katie would fall from the jungle gym at school during recess, scared she'd need something he couldn't provide, scared his life would continue as this constant grind of fear and love and exhaustion forever."

"But now that you've been told you can't do it anymore, you've stopped, right? It might hurt, but you've faced it."

"Lotta things are in my blood. Doesn't mean they have to come out."

"She'd come home to the apartment she shared with Rosemary covered in bruises and bite marks and scratches on her back, rubbed straight down to the bone with the kind of urgent exhaustion she imagined an addict felt between fixes."

"This pressing of flesh, this enveloping of bodies and scent and need and love, yes, love, because she loved him as deeply as she ever had now that she knew she'd almost lost him."

"They were never there when you needed them. It had been the same with his mother. That morning after the police had brought him home, his mother had cooked him breakfast, her back to him, humming 'Old MacDonald,' and occasionally turning to look back over her shoulder at him to toss him a nervous smile, as if he were a boarder she wasn't sure about."

"You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes—beyond logic—and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn't want to face, weren't sure you could."

"But she'd risen to the challenge here in her own home. She'd taken everything that had been thrown at her since he'd come home last night and she'd dealt with it. She'd conquered it."

"So watch out. Bring your worst. I will get back up. Every time. I will not shrivel and die."

"And she knew with a sudden, refreshing certainty that she was still young and strong and she was most definitely not a disposable toaster or broken vacuum."

"So there it was: all the evidence. Or at least all the evidence she could do anything about."

"When had he become this thing—this man who'd say yes, sir, no, sir, right you are, sir, to fucking cops when his firstborn daughter was missing?"

"It was what you did—you came on-scene knowing the truth, and then spent as much time as you could hoping you were wrong."

"That's what you carried back home and into the bars and locker rooms of the precincts or barracks—an annoyed acceptance that people sucked, people were dumb and petty-bad, often murderously so."

"The worst thing was those who'd loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain."

"You got to the point where you stopped comparing."

"You were one of the first on-scene, and you know these people."

"I want you sharp and I want you edgy. I don't want you overtly outraged, because outrage is emotion and emotion should never be overt. But I want you pretty fucking annoyed at all times."

"You know what I like even less than ten-year-old black boys getting shot by bullshit gang-war crossfire? Nineteen-year-old white girls getting murdered in my parks."

"It wouldn't matter much if he had. You got to the point where you stopped comparing."

"Until today, Jimmy would judge all patience tests against that first night at Deer Island."

"I was once lost, But now, praise the Lord, I am found."

"You ever think how the most minor decision can change the entire direction of your life?"

"I'm just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected."

"Sometimes during a jog, Sean found himself back on Gannon Street, standing on the spot in the middle of the street where he and Jimmy and Dave Boyle had rolled around fighting, then looked up to see that car waiting for them."

"It had occurred to Sean once that maybe they had gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state."

"He wanted to tell Jimmy that he occasionally sweated through his old dream, the one in which the street gripped his feet and slid him toward that open door."

"He wanted to tell him he hadn't truly known what to make of his life since that day, that he was a man who often felt light with his own weightlessness, the insubstantial nature of his character."

"We'll speak for her, Mrs. Marcus. If that's okay, we'll do that."

"Jimmy had always liked sitting out here at night. The storefronts across the avenue were closed and mostly dark. At night, a hush fell over an area where commercial business was conducted during the day, and it was a hush unlike any other."

"Each generation, we have fewer and fewer of them. A few hundred years, we turn the island into Club Med or something. Kids hear about these freaks the way they hear about ghosts now, as something we've, I dunno, evolved beyond."

"Sean could see the ravages of the day finding her face and body now, beginning to drape her. The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older—a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she'd never asked for."

"Towards the extinguished lights, dummy. Toward the shattered glass."

"Sometimes she wouldn't tell me where she was going because it might be to meet Bobby, I guess, to try to convince him that they were over."

"I knew her, and I saw her in a bar last night."

"The motivation was easy—people were stupid. Chimps. But worse, because chimps didn't kill one another over scratch tickets."

"She was just another body, just another broken light."

"They were as opposite as two people could get and still be considered part of the same species."

"She was a slim woman and tall, with hair the color of cherry wood. When she laughed, she covered her mouth with her fingers."

"She'd baked and helped with the funeral arrangements and sat with Celeste while she'd wept for a mother who'd never shown much in the way of love, but had been her mother, nonetheless."

"He always looked like he'd just come back from boot camp."

"Seems like you only see your family and friends at weddings and wakes."

"You make sure you don't let your grief become an indulgence, Jim, and, you know, pull you away from your domestic responsibilities."

"There are so few of them left from the old days anymore."

"The yuppies who bought it probably get per unit what your old man sold the whole place for."

"You're on the go your whole life with work and kids and, shit, except when you're sleeping, you hardly have any time to slow down."

"The moment I can, I'm going to start heading back out. Why didn't she cut north toward Roseclair, or double back toward Sydney? Why keep going deeper into the park?"

"Missing you will be my cancer. It will kill me."

"If you take away money or love and hate as possible motives, you're not left with much."

"I love you more than life. And missing you will be my cancer. It will kill me."

"I wasn't watched her. I'd heard her walk out, but my eyes had been on the order sheet lying in front of him on the desk blotter."

"I love you, in truth, more than I loved your mother, more than I love your sisters, more than I love Annabeth, so help me God."

"But we rose from that, didn't we? We built our lives into something good enough so that one day we weren't afraid, we weren't forlorn."

"Life isn't happily ever after and golden sunsets and shit like that. It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, shit, you roll up your sleeves and work— at everything— because that's what growing older is."

"Everyone was childish at one time or another. It's what you reverted to, particularly when the shit piled up."

"You know what's odd, though? You don't strike me as the kind of guy who'd give someone phantom tickets. It seems childish. You don't seem like a childish man."

"That's what it's like. Knowing all the answers on a test the minute you sit down at your desk. It's like knowing everything's going to be okay for the rest of your life."

"Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you'd fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had."

"They're alone, and even if the doctors won't tell them, that's what they're dying from."

"You can walk at night without looking over your shoulder."

"Bad shit happens to everyone, Sean. Everyone. You ain't special."

"When you write to her. You know, a card every now and then for no good reason. She says you send funny cards and she likes the way you write."

"You were right not to get in that car that day. Remember that."

"The key to any successful interrogation was to get as much time as possible before the suspect demanded a lawyer."

"People were stupid. They killed each other over the dumbest things and then they hung around hoping to get caught."

"It was knowing how stupid they really were that was a cop's best weapon."

"Scarier than a glass of milk, maybe. Not as scary as some nights around here, though."

"He'd heard somewhere of ancient cultures that used to eat the hearts of the people they murdered."

"In killing someone, he'd killed that weak part of himself, that freak who had lain in him since he was eleven years old."

"Jimmy would have forked over the money for a mausoleum if he thought it would make Katie happy."

"If sampling was an art form, then most of the thieves Jimmy had known growing up were artists, too."