“A child, I'm miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his father's sky. Why do you fate me to… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“Gladys had seen all of this, and she made it his to know. She'd lost her future to death, and lost her… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You’re sad about the kids,… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“...I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her… — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“You’ve never felt good. Your suffering protects you. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free.” — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“He didn’t know what country he was in, but he was at home in the universe.” — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide.” — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off. — Denis Johnson Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image