Amanda

“He was in his fifties. He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd wasted only a few years.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“...if she had known just a few months before, during more innocent times, that she would feel that way for the rest of her life....which is to say conflicted, she would have treasured those unaware, nonjudgmental, preadolescent moments more thoroughly. (Oh, to be eleven again!) Because once you know, once you really know how the world works, you can't unknow it.”
― Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

“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

“They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?”
― Kate Braverman