Quotes from Denis Johnson

I stayed in the library, crushed breathless by the smoldering power of all those words – many of them unfathomable – until Happy Hour. And then I left.

For many minutes before she showed herself, he felt her moving around the place. He detected her presence as unmistakably as he would have sensed the shape of someone blocking the light through a window, even with his eyes closed.

It was his foreignness, inability to make himself accepted, essential loserness, that made him look away.

He'd come to war to see abstractions become realities. Instead he'd seen the reverse. Everything was abstract now.

If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I'd certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time.

The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn't yet come to light, and so we kept on in one another's company, going to bars and having conversations.

It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.

There's been a lie told. I've told it. I'm going to let the truth reclaim me. If I can't survive that process, so be it.

I'm sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green--in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorus--islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight, dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck's seams.

In fact he was no longer persuaded that blood and revolution made useful tools for altering the concepts in a person's mind. Who said it?—probably Confucius—" I can't beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can't free the soul of a man by violence." Peace was here, peace was now. Peace promised in any other time or place was a lie.

He was so entranced, he was so charmed, so captivated-rolled out flat, dreamed into, shone upon-that when she said his name, English started to live.

Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.

A child, I'm miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his father's sky. Why do you fate me to fail you?

We parked under a strange sky with a faint image of a quarter-moon superimposed on it. There was a little woods beside us. This day had been dry out and hot, the buck pines and what-all simmering patientyl, but as we sat there smoking cigarettes it started to get very cold. The summer's over, I said.

She knew: shit, we might as well have been drinking a dog's tears. Nothing mattered except that we were alive.

Now we had a stupid silence, the kind that always descends on people who are half in the bag.

Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church's grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments - implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make.

He didn't like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.

G]ive him this much: death didn't just walk up and inhale him. He wasn't exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.

When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside—jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely. We

You can't burgulate a forgotten, empty house," he said, horrified at my stupidity.

The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, whilted 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.

I have one ship and they call me a pirate. You have a fleet and they call you an Emperor. I can't remember who said it.

Harold's Bow and Food Bowl bowl bowl bowl Food food food food The miracle of the heavenly restaurant I mouth this great dark sad evening Suddenly they come for me in a limousine How could I have believed I was vanquished I never lay slain I am the victor this parade is for me Now they have led me to the doors of God Long ago and forever I was in this place on the other side of eating where I am full and the empty bowl is beautiful -- from Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs