Top 100 Denis Johnson Quotes
#1. But come to California. Come to these canyons if you want to be driven by sacredness into the air. If you dream of the true, clear silences, if you want those silences to sing - come to California.
Denis Johnson
#2. The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in - as if he'd been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream.
Denis Johnson
#3. A child, I'm miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his father's sky. Why do you fate me to fail you?
Denis Johnson
#4. You can't burgulate a forgotten, empty house, he said, horrified at my stupidity.
Denis Johnson
#5. A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine.
Denis Johnson
#6. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.
Denis Johnson
#7. He didn't like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.
Denis Johnson
#8. Things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.
Denis Johnson
#10. When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar.
Denis Johnson
#11. After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
Denis Johnson
#12. This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
Denis Johnson
#14. The first time I didn't say anything, because she shot me in the mouth.
Denis Johnson
#15. He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.
Denis Johnson
#16. All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
Denis Johnson
#17. Love and violence-not to conquer one with the other but to live with both, that's what I've learned. Each pulling me a different way. If I relax my struggles they don't tear me in two, but lift me up.
Denis Johnson
#18. What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.
Denis Johnson
#19. I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me ... I'm the one happening.
Denis Johnson
#20. We'd torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that
Denis Johnson
#21. The Americans won't win. They're not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.
Denis Johnson
#22. I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together ... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.
Denis Johnson
#23. Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.
Denis Johnson
#24. There's so much goop inside of us, man," he said, "and it all just wants to get out.
Denis Johnson
#25. Eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination.
Denis Johnson
#26. Everybody's got a mean side. Just don't feed it till it grows.
Denis Johnson
#27. You've never felt good. Your suffering protects you. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free.
Denis Johnson
#28. I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself.
Because boldness doesn't feel bold. It feels scared not brave.
Denis Johnson
#29. What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?
Denis Johnson
#30. Write the unpublishable...and then publish it.
Denis Johnson
#31. We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.
Denis Johnson
#32. For many minutes before she showed herself, he felt her moving around the place. He detected her presence as unmistakably as he would have sensed the shape of someone blocking the light through a window, even with his eyes closed.
Denis Johnson
#33. Does everything you touch turn to shit? Does this happen to you every time?"
"No wonder they call me Fuckhead."
It's a name that's going to stick.
Denis Johnson
#34. I'll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.
Denis Johnson
#35. Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never inside
it was a dream.
Denis Johnson
#36. There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide.
Denis Johnson
#37. Write naked. That means to write what you would never say.
Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it.
Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.
Denis Johnson
#38. If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.
Denis Johnson
#39. Her midriff bare, like the denizen ... of some pampering seraglio.
Denis Johnson
#40. THE PEOPLE'S THIRST FOR FREEDOM HAS DRIVEN US TO DRINK BAD WATER.
Denis Johnson
#41. With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.
Denis Johnson
#42. [The doctor] peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk - that is, me - standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face.
'What seems to be the trouble?' he asked.
Denis Johnson
#43. She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.
Denis Johnson
#44. How could I tell you about it? It was a dream. It didn't make any fucking sense, man. But I do remember it.
Denis Johnson
#45. Meaning can't change from person to person, and still be true
Denis Johnson
#46. I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities.
Denis Johnson
#47. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Denis Johnson
#48. If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.
Denis Johnson
#49. The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
Denis Johnson
#50. I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it.
Denis Johnson
#51. He was in his fifties. He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd wasted only a few years.
Denis Johnson
#52. I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.
Denis Johnson
#53. Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.
Denis Johnson
#54. There were stories that the tunnels went for miles. There were monsters down there, blind reptiles and insects that had never seen the light, there were hospitals and brothels, and horrible things, piles of the offal from VC atrocities, dead babies, assassinated priests.
Denis Johnson
#55. In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don't know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their cliches yet full of helpless poetry.
Denis Johnson
#56. Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she'd loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn't possibly suffer any change.
Denis Johnson
#57. Are you hearing unusual sounds or voices?" the doctor asked.
"Help us, oh God, it hurts," the boxes of cotton screamed.
"Not exactly," I said.
Denis Johnson
#58. He saw no sign of their Bible, either. If the Lord had failed to protect even the book of his own Word, this proved to Grainier that here had come a fire stronger than God.
Denis Johnson
#59. Nobody's going to cook me and eat me, I hope."
"People don't quite understand," Michael said, and he may have been serious, "to be eaten pays a compliment to your power.
Denis Johnson
#60. English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
Denis Johnson
#61. It made me in all matters a fundamentalist. I didn't go to 'take it in.' I went to be convicted.
Denis Johnson
#62. His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop.
Denis Johnson
#63. They needed to share one secret after another with a beautiful woman, to peel away layer after layer, mask after mask, and still find themselves worshiped.
Denis Johnson
#64. In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts.
Denis Johnson
#65. You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations.
Denis Johnson
#66. To find the people who've became truly sane, seek among those who've managed to do without sanity.
Denis Johnson
#69. Incidentally, this is the only letter I'll send - don't think I'll turn you in, don't think for a second I'd alert the authorities, I mean, fuck them, and certainly, of course, fuck you, but above everything fuck them. I've always stood for that. Admittedly not much else.
Denis Johnson
#70. It wasn't that she expected to be known by all the bank's employees; it was just that she had been lovely once, and had never really believed that time would make her faceless.
Denis Johnson
#71. Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.
Denis Johnson
#72. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
Denis Johnson
#73. It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts.
Denis Johnson
#74. I'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me.
Denis Johnson
#75. Like all men you have a religion - at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I'd hope a religion to be ...
Denis Johnson
#76. You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric...
Denis Johnson
#77. And sometimes a dust storm would stand off in the desert, towering so high it was like another city
a terrifying new era approaching, blurring our dreams.
Denis Johnson
#78. With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I'd been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen.
Denis Johnson
#79. The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them.
Denis Johnson
#81. When I reached the street I didn't know whether to go right or left. Soon I'd have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.
Denis Johnson
#82. I pushed through the door into Kelly's. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You'd think they'd found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds.
Denis Johnson
#83. How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse.
Denis Johnson
#84. She took my heat. Traded it to the devil for some bauble.
Denis Johnson
#85. Maybe, when you hear the name "Beverly," you think of Beverly Hills
people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money.
Denis Johnson
#86. Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.
Denis Johnson
#87. I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.
Denis Johnson
#88. Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?
Denis Johnson
#89. [G]ive him this much: death didn't just walk up and inhale him. He wasn't exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.
Denis Johnson
#90. He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd only wasted a few years.
Denis Johnson
#91. We can't always tell the whole story about ourselves.
Denis Johnson
#92. That world! These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?
Denis Johnson
#94. The jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood.
Denis Johnson
#95. He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.
Denis Johnson
#96. FH: All these ... weirdos, and me ... getting a little better every day right in the middle of 'em. I had never known ... I had never even imagined for a heartbeat that ... there might be a place in the world for people like us ... Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson
#97. If illness didn't kill you, you died of bad luck.
Denis Johnson
#98. Bugs Bunny with a double-barreled twelve-gauge shoots you in the head with a miracle.
Denis Johnson
#99. All night the dreamer travels in this region and doesn't realize he's asleep. The differences between the logic of that world and the logic of this waking one are vast. But they feel the same. And isn't that how we recognize logic, by the way it feels?
Denis Johnson
#100. He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.
Denis Johnson
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