Denis Johnson quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Denis Johnson on Wise Famous Quotes.

Meaning can't change from person to person, and still be true

Things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.

We'd torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that

Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.

I knew every raindrop by its name.

How could I tell you about it? It was a dream. It didn't make any fucking sense, man. But I do remember it.

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.

What I don't think has been talked about is the fact that in order to be Hell, the people in Hell could never be sure they were really there.

She took my heat. Traded it to the devil for some bauble.

There was a part of her she hadn't yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place

And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.

Write naked. Write in exile. Write in blood.

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.

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.

We can't always tell the whole story about ourselves.

The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.

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.

His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop.

Survival was a breeze that touched some and not others. Neither hope nor hopelessness had anything to do with it.

Bugs Bunny with a double-barreled twelve-gauge shoots you in the head with a miracle.

[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.

When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside - jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely. We

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.

She knew: shit, we might as well have been drinking a dog's tears. Nothing mattered except that we were alive.

We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.

The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them.

With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.

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.

When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar.

As he expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense.

To find the people who've became truly sane, seek among those who've managed to do without sanity.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd only wasted a few years.

There's so much goop inside of us, man," he said, "and it all just wants to get out.

I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me ... I'm the one happening.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.

Maybe, when you hear the name "Beverly," you think of Beverly Hills
people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money.

The jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood.

Is that why I went wild over her? Because once I saw her truly? Is devotion as simple as that?

The movie's not over till everybody's dead.

This life is but the childhood of our immortality.

Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.

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 ...

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.

You've never felt good. Your suffering protects you. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free.

In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.

And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.

After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.

There was nothing of his I wanted in particular. I wanted it all.

Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.

It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.

Write the unpublishable...and then publish it.

If illness didn't kill you, you died of bad luck.

You can't burgulate a forgotten, empty house, he said, horrified at my stupidity.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

What a pair of lungs!

WE'RE ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF REALITY ITSELF. RIGHT WHERE IT TURNS INTO A DREAM

It made me in all matters a fundamentalist. I didn't go to 'take it in.' I went to be convicted.

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?

The coyotes sounded like hurt dogs. They agitated plainly for Christ's return. May they not be heard.

She was a woman, a traitor, and a killer. Males and females wanted her. But I was the only one who ever could have loved her.

Everybody's got a mean side. Just don't feed it till it grows.

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.

Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.

THE PEOPLE'S THIRST FOR FREEDOM HAS DRIVEN US TO DRINK BAD WATER.

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?

The first time I didn't say anything, because she shot me in the mouth.

You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric...

There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide.

Her midriff bare, like the denizen ... of some pampering seraglio.

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.

Eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination.