Quotes from Denis Johnson

She was a woman, a traitor, and a killer. Males and females wanted her. But I was the only one who ever could have loved her.

They started calling it The Rape, and it came to stand for everything: for coming together while falling apart; for loving each other and hating everybody else; for moving at breakneck speed while getting nowhere; for freezing in the streets and melting in the rooms of love.

The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.

Survival was a breeze that touched some and not others. Neither hope nor hopelessness had anything to do with it.

Survival is the foundation of triumph.

With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I'd been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen.

As he expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense.

It wasn't that she expected to be known by all the bank's employees; it was just that she had been lovely once, and had never really believed that time would make her faceless.

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. I think we need to be much more conscious of that. I think we need to be invoking the other fellow's gods too.

Since Marco Polo, he thought, this climate has defeated Western civilization.

Maybe, when you hear the name Beverly, you think of Beverly Hills--people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money.

You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric...

Her midriff bare, like the denizen...of some pampering seraglio.

Frost had built on the dead grass, and it skirled beneath his feet. If not for this sound he'd have thought himself struck deaf, owing to the magnitude of the surrounding silence. All the night's noises had stopped. The whole valley seemed to reflect his shock. He heard only his footsteps and the wolf-girl's panting complaint.

All night the dreamer travels in this region and doesn't realize he's asleep. The differences between the logic of that world and the logic of this waking one are vast. But they feel the same. And isn't that how we recognize logic, by the way it feels?

I knew that, but he didn't, 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, that's not the great pity. I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn't tell him what was real.

She was resting at a table between numbers in the Greek nightclub where she was dancing. A little of the stage light touched her. She was very frail. She seemed to be thinking about something far away, waiting patiently for somebody to destroy her.

I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body, lonesome behind the face that is certainly not the face of the person one meant to become.

Incidentally, this is the only letter I'll send— don't think I'll turn you in, don't think for a second I'd alert the authorities, I mean, fuck them, and certainly, of course, fuck you, but above everything fuck them. I've always stood for that. Admittedly not much else.

If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.

It's a beautiful day" – by which we meant that the weather was good. But we never say, "The weather's good," "The weather's pleasant." We say, "It's a beautiful day," "What a beautiful day.

To find the people who've became truly sane, seek among those who've managed to do without sanity.

Night again, the insects are loud, the moths are killing themselves on the lamp. Two hours ago I sat on the veranda looking out at the dusk, filled with envy for each living entity—bird, bug, blossom, reptile, tree, and vine—that doesn't bear the burden of the knowledge of good and evil. The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive

Her zealous hope of Heaven made it hell there.