Quotes from Denis Johnson

while the jukebox sang softly to itself.

You bury a friend—that gives you an enemy. It calls you more deeply into the cause. Then the time comes when you kill a friend. And that might drive you away. It can also have the opposite result—to deafen you against your own voice when it wants to ask questions.

The water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God.

There's nothing wrong with me"—I'm surprised I let those words out. But it's always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.

I was a whimpering dog inside, nothing more than that. I looked for work because people seemed to believe I should look for work, and when I found a job I believed I was happy about it because these same people – counselors and Narcotics Anonymous members and such – seemed to think a job was a happy thing.

How could I tell you about it? It was a dream. It didn't make any fucking sense, man. But I do remember it.

My habit when I've been humiliated is to go out and buy a book.

people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money.

To English it was amazing how a song will take a whole confused epoch in your life, and fashion it into something sharp and elegant with which to pierce your neck.

She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel.…and the entire message had no words. The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time. Yes is Now. The angel who says, "It's time." "Is it time?" she asked. "Does it hurt?" He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen. "Oh, babe." The angel starts to cry. "You can't imagine," he said.

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

Staring at his own face reflected in a cup of bitter karma. For

Skip experienced no excitement. Only the lethargy and sadness of a man freezing to death.

I go to the movies as I'd go to the dawn, / and the triumphs there, the things that are brought to light, / the large, sad lives of people not so different from me, their stories heard / through a tumbler held to the ear / and seen through a gauze of falling sand— / these are my triumphs; I am brought to light. — Denis Johnson, from "Movie Within a Movie," The Veil: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987)

In those days he'd known how to sit still. He'd learned to live a good part of each day in the silence under the world. Now the world lived in his mind, it colonized his solitude like a virus, thoughts crawled, shot, rained through his meditation, and every one pierced him.

People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen.

There's a price to be paid for dreaming.

The rest of the evening I wondered, every second, if he would come back with some friends and make something painful and degrading happen.

One small, orange flower that looked as if it had fallen down here from Andromeda, surrounded by a part of the world cast mainly in eleven hundred shades of brown, under a sky whose blueness seemed to get lost in it's own distances.

He was a sad case. His jacket was lightweight and yellow. He might have been wearing it for the first time. It was the kind of jacket a foreigner would buy in a store while saying to himself, "I am buying an American jacket.

read until his focus loosened and the lines of text divided into duplicates and floated on the page.

It's my last year in the navy, he explained to the girl. I came across this ocean and died. They might as well bring back my bones. I'm all different.

The feeling that he was afraid of me was invigorating.

I've masqueraded as a literary critic, and with a great deal more success, but criticism isn't real—it's not a real thing.