All Denis Johnson Quotes
- 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,… Accused
- 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… Across
- 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.… Any
- 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… Away Layer
- 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.… Another Human
- Death is the mother of beauty. Beauty
- 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… Cup
- 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… All
- Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine. Bullet
- 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… Alive
- 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… All
- English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows. Empty
- I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me...I'm the one happening. Draw
- Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart,… Burst
- 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… Body
- Love and violence-not to conquer one with the other but to live with both, that's what I've learned. Each pulling me a different way. If… Both
- This life is but the childhood of our immortality. Childhood
- 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… Accident
- 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.… Been
- 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,… Away Leaving
- 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… Alcohol
- In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being. Bare
- 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. Belief
- When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from… Across
- 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,… All