The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of…

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

— Denis Johnson

“He had laid his head back until his scalp had contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose…

— Denis Johnson

“Everything is arranged," John Robertson told me. Thank God." I forgot to mention that we appear to have one small problem," he said. Okay..."…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— Denis Johnson

“He didn’t know what country he was in, but he was at home in the universe.”

— Denis Johnson

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

— Denis Johnson

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

— Denis Johnson

“Who said it? – probably Confucius – “I can’t beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can’t free the soul of…

— 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…

— Denis Johnson

I knew every raindrop by its name.

— Denis Johnson

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

— Denis Johnson

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

— Denis Johnson