Quotes from Denis Johnson

What can be said about those fields? There were blackbirds circling above their own shadows, and beneath them the cows stood around smelling one another's butts.

Well, it's very much for each person to experience alone," he said, and whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.

Skip stared at the ranks of the players. Men who raced from the benches to collide with one another in joyful bloodshed. Who let themselves be hammered and rounded into cops and warriors and lived in a world completely inaccessible to women and children.

I know everything." Heinz sputtered and fumed somewhat like an automobile himself, and said, "I'm God!" Grainier thought about how to answer. Here seemed a conversation that could go no farther.

For his part he sensed with despair that he wouldn't come, no matter how long they kept at it. But this activity made him happy, he could stand here all night and offer pleasure to this other human being, this creature of form and flesh crying like an anvil.

Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?' Oh, I don't know. I'm a fat piece of shit, I guess.

Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.

We whizzed along down through the skeleton remnants of Iowa.

Are you hearing unusual sounds or voices?" the doctor asked. "Help us, oh God, it hurts," the boxes of cotton screamed. "Not exactly," I said.

whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.

All I'd done in better than two decades was tread forward until I reached the limit of certain assumptions, and stepped off.

But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.

Nothing sudden is happening here. More is just suddenly being revealed.

What a pair of lungs!

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

Beyond my window, a thick layer of snow covered the ledge. I became aware of a hush of anticipation, a tremendous surrounding absence. I got out of bed, dressed in my clothes, and went out to look at the city.

Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, "This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.

They'd been here twenty seconds, and already nothing was happening.

You know there is a cycle of imagining and desire, desire and death, death and birth, birth and imagining. And we have been tempted into its mouth. And it has swallowed us.

Cherry Loot told Sergeant Burke, "I'm gonna make the best of this fuck-a-monkey show. Don't mean fuck to me if it's illegal, unjustified, and sinful. Today we're heroes, tomorrow we're the Nazis. You never know. Nobody on this ball knows shit." It was an attitude refreshing if not outright inspiring.

First I put my lips to her upper lip, then to the bottom of her pout, and then I kissed her fully, my mouth on her open mouth, and we met inside.

Around these strange people I felt hungry. I smelled some kind of debauchery, the whiff of a potion that would banish everything plaguing me.

I don't remember what I said to them. I remember loneliness crushing first my lungs. Then my heart. Then my balls.

Gladys had seen all of this, and she made it his to know. She'd lost her future to death, and lost her child to life.