Denis Johnson Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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