Quotes from Denis Johnson

I worked on a peak outside Bisbee, Arizona, where we were only eleven or twelve miles from the sun. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long. And that was in the shade. And there weren't no shade.

His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop.

Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You're sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don't do the women, you don't kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don't care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don't care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals.

In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don't know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their cliches yet full of helpless poetry.

He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd only wasted a few years.

What I don't think has been talked about is the fact that in order to be Hell, the people in Hell could never be sure they were really there.

The sky was a bruised red shot with black, almost exactly the colors of a tattoo. Sunset had two minutes left to live.

But come to California. Come to these canyons if you want to be driven by sacredness into the air. If you dream of the true, clear silences, if you want those silences to sing - come to California.

Meaning can't change from person to person, and still be true

There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide.

News had reached his ears that they planned to distribute mixtures alongside Route One and Route Twenty-two to kill the vegetation there. Depriving ambushers of cover was a good idea, he thought. But this was the loveliest country on the earth. Sorrow and war lay all over it, true, but the sickness of sorrow had never before penetrated the land itself. He didn't like to see it poisoned.

Howling, are you?" the Indian said. "There it is for you, then. That's what happens, that's what they say: There's not a wolf alive that can't tame a man.

It made me in all matters a fundamentalist. I didn't go to 'take it in.' I went to be convicted.

All of this while I left lifted by a strange new medium, a strange element--I now tell you that I was newly buoyant in a brighter life. In the midst of a hymn, God had disappeared. It was like waking from a nightmare in which I'd been paralyzed. Like discovering that gravity itself had been only a bad dream.

things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.

The coyotes sounded like hurt dogs. They agitated plainly for Christ's return. May they not be heard.

I know they argue about whether or not it's right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn't about that. It wasn't what the lawyers did. It wasn't what the doctors did, it wasn't what the woman did. It was what the mother and father did together.

There was nothing of his I wanted in particular. I wanted it all.

But I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I have never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

She took my heat. Traded it to the devil for some bauble.

My father is dead! As soon as he'd said it, Fiskadoro saw he'd made it true again--again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn't simple. It wasn't one thing, but a thousand things carrying him away to the Ocean: the work of a person's life was to drink it.

He didn't know what country he was in, but he was at home in the universe.

I pushed through the door into Kelly's. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You'd think they'd found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds.

His elbows cracked loudly when he straightened his arms, and something hitched and snapped in his right shoulder when he moved it the wrong way; a general stiffness of his frame worked itself out by halves through most mornings, and he labored like an engine through the afternoons, but he was well past thirty-five years, closer now to forty, and he really wasn't much good in the woods anymore.