Quotes from Denis Johnson

Like all men you have a religion - at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I'd hope a religion to be...

Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the Ten Thousand Things? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you even know the difference?

We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.

The first time I didn't say anything, because she shot me in the mouth.

Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There'd been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn't even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.

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

Write the unpublishable...and then publish it.

The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them.

I'd thought something was required of me, but I hadn't wanted to find out what it was.

Nobody's going to cook me and eat me, I hope. People don't quite understand, Michael said, and he may have been serious, to be eaten pays a compliment to your power.

THE PEOPLE'S THIRST FOR FREEDOM HAS DRIVEN US TO DRINK BAD WATER.

The lid, however, wouldn't shut. The mind held back the whole sky.

And sometimes a dust storm would stand off in the desert, towering so high it was like another city -- a terrifying new era approaching, blurring our dreams.

Bugs Bunny with a double-barreled twelve-gauge shoots you in the head with a miracle.

He saw no sign of their Bible, either. If the Lord had failed to protect even the book of his own Word, this proved to Grainier that here had come a fire stronger than God.

It seemed the two held forth on parallel tracks, confident of meeting somewhere in infinity.

It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he'd reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he'd never be able to guess what it was.

Is that why I went wild over her? Because once I saw her truly? Is devotion as simple as that?

Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he'd been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.

Animals had returned to what was left of the forest...clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people traveled the muddy road, leaving tracks straight up and down the middle of it...

It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.

I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities.

The movie's not over till everybody's dead.

FH: All these... weirdos, and me... getting a little better every day right in the middle of 'em. I had never known... I had never even imagined for a heartbeat that... there might be a place in the world for people like us...Jesus' Son