Quotes from Denis Johnson

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

War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn't it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don't we, and we constantly invoke our God. It's got to be about something bigger than dying, or we'd all turn deserter.

Talk into here. Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.

It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts.

The Past just left. Its remnants, I claim, are mostly fiction. We're stranded here with the threadbare patchwork of memory, you with yours, I with mine.

Three Rules To Write By Write naked. That means to write what you would never say. Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it. Write in exile as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail. 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 images in a slot machine.

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.

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 I relax my struggles they don't tear me in two, but lift me up.

If illness didn't kill you, you died of bad luck.

Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.

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 it be?

Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.

The Americans won't win. They're not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.

I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me. Yes, a ghost. A vestige. Something remaining.

Who said it? – probably Confucius – "I can't beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can't free the soul of man by violence." Peace was here, peace was now. Peace promised in any other time or place was a lie.

WE'RE ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF REALITY ITSELF. RIGHT WHERE IT TURNS INTO A DREAM

Grainier still went to services some rare times, when a trip to town coincided. People spoke nicely to him there, people recognized him from the days when he'd attended almost regularly with Gladys, but he generally regretted going. He very often wept in church. Living up the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered.

We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.

It's plain to you that at the time I write this, I'm not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.

It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.

Supposedly she'd died, but here she was again–somewhat changed, but you couldn't kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn't even been born.

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

We Vietnamese have two philosophies to sustain us. The Confucian tells us how to behave when fate grants us peace and order. The Buddhist trains us to accept our fate even when it brings us blood and chaos.