Denis Johnson Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

The appeal was obvious, the cleanly geometry, the assurances of physical ballistics, the organic richness of the wooden lanes and the mute servitude of the machines that raised the pins and swept away the fallen, above all the powerlessness and suspense, the ball held, the ball directed, the ball traveling away like a son, beyond hope of influence. A slow, large, powerful game. Sands — Denis Johnson

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

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate? — Denis Johnson

This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you
we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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

I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd even known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven. — Denis Johnson

It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he'd reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he'd never be able to guess what it was. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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

This life is but the childhood of our immortality. — Denis Johnson

All of this while I left lifted by a strange new medium, a strange element
I now tell you that I was newly buoyant in a brighter life. In the midst of a hymn, God had disappeared. It was like waking from a nightmare in which I'd been paralyzed. Like discovering that gravity itself had been only a bad dream. — Denis Johnson

People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar. And what are you going to do to me now? With what, exactly, would you expect to frighten me? — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

Howling, are you?" the Indian said. "There it is for you, then. That's what happens, that's what they say: There's not a wolf alive that can't tame a man. — Denis Johnson

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

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

I wandered over across the hall where they were showing a short movie about vasectomies. Much later I told her that I'd actually gotten a vasectomy a long time ago, and somebody else must have gotten her pregnant. I also told her once that I had inoperable cancer and would soon be passed away and gone, eternally. But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me. — Denis Johnson

I knew every raindrop by its name. — Denis Johnson

[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

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

Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church's grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments - implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all
cash, booze, and a wife
he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground. — Denis Johnson

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

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

The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached ... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way. — Denis Johnson

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. — Denis Johnson

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

What a pair of lungs! — Denis Johnson

The scene before her flattened, lost one of its dimensions, and the noise dribbled irrelevantly down its face. Something was coming. This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking
someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can't remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who've ruined their health, worshipped their own lives, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved. — Denis Johnson

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

Die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. If this were true, the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman. There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide
and then never proven, only tested again by another attempt. And the person embarked on that series of tests, treading that trail of lives as if from boulder to boulder across the river of time
no, out into the burning ocean of eternity
what a mutant! Some new genesis, like a pale, poisonous daisy. — Denis Johnson

We parked under a strange sky with a faint image of a quarter-moon superimposed on it. There was a little woods beside us. This day had been dry out and hot, the buck pines and what-all simmering patientyl, but as we sat there smoking cigarettes it started to get very cold. "The summer's over," I said. — Denis Johnson

Write naked. Write in exile. Write in blood. — Denis Johnson

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. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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

Animals had returned to what was left of the forest ... clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people traveled the muddy road, leaving tracks straight up and down the middle of it ... — Denis Johnson

I'm sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green
in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorus
islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight, dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck's seams. — Denis Johnson

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

I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become. — Denis Johnson

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

Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that. — Denis Johnson

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

She was resting at a table between numbers in the Greek nightclub where she was dancing. A little of the stage light touched her. She was very frail. She seemed to be thinking about something far away, waiting patiently for somebody to destroy her. — Denis Johnson

A bum woke up in the gutter right beside where I stood looking across the street at this place. He felt in the waist of his pants and came up with a pint bottle, half full. He tipped it up and it gurgled steadily until he'd emptied it all down into him. I was only twenty-four or -five but I already knew from experience how it tasted. And people who've kissed the feet of Christ know how it tasted. I saw everything there in the gutter
the terror and the promise. Later I spent the morning in the smoky Day Labor Division with better than a hundred men who'd learned how not to move, learned how to stay beautifully still and let their lives hurt them, white men with gray faces and black men with yellow eyes. I worked the rest of the week in a factory without ever comprehending exactly what was manufactured there, and at night I'd get drunk and shut myself in a phone booth and call the woman in Minnesota who'd broken my heart. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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

Write the unpublishable...and then publish it. — Denis Johnson

If he died now, Grainier probably wouldn't know it until they came into the light of the gas lamps either side of the doctor's house. After they'd moved along for nearly an hour without conversation, listening only to the creaking wagon and the sound of the nearby river and the clop of the mares, it grew dark. — Denis Johnson

Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the "Ten Thousand Things"? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you eve know the difference? — Denis Johnson

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

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

Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he'd been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed. — Denis Johnson

And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person's life on this earth. I don't mean that we all end up dead, that's not the great pity. I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn't tell him what was real. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

Frost had built on the dead grass, and it skirled beneath his feet. If not for this sound he'd have thought himself struck deaf, owing to the magnitude of the surrounding silence. All the night's noises had stopped. The whole valley seemed to reflect his shock. He heard only his footsteps and the wolf-girl's panting complaint. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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

Once upon a time there was a war ... and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

Grainier still went to services some rare times, when a trip to town coincided. People spoke nicely to him there, people recognized him from the days when he'd attended almost regularly with Gladys, but he generally regretted going. He very often wept in church. Living up the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered. — Denis Johnson

Or maybe that wasn't the time it snowed. Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them. It doesn't matter. What's important for me to remember now is that early the next morning the snow was melted off the windshield and the daylight woke me up. A mist covered everything and, with the sunshine, was beginning to grow sharp and strange. The bunnies weren't a problem yet, or they'd already been a problem and were already forgotten, and there was nothing on my mind. I felt the beauty of the morning. I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched. Or how a slave might become a friend to his master. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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