Denis Johnson > Quotes

“She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.”
― Denis Johnson

“I knew every raindrop by its name.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

“English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.”
― Denis Johnson

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

“All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

“When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all -- cash, booze, and a wife -- he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground.”
― Denis Johnson

“With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“We’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.”
― Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me...I'm the one happening.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.”
― Denis Johnson

“And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’d even known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

“The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”
― Denis Johnson

“What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?”
― Denis Johnson

“It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.”
― Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

“He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.”
― Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

“How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

“But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moanmusic of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.”
― Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

“[The doctor] peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk - that is, me - standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face.

'What seems to be the trouble?' he asked.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.”
― Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“I'll never forget you. 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.”
― Denis Johnson

“Death is the mother of beauty.”
― Denis Johnson, Angels

“Once upon a time there was a war...and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me.”
― Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son