Denis Johnson Quotes

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.

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.

It wasn't that she expected to be known by all the bank's employees; it was just that she had been lovely once, and had never really believed that time would make her faceless.

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

I'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me.

The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.

FH: All these ... weirdos, and me ... getting a little better every day right in the middle of 'em. I had never known ... I had never even imagined for a heartbeat that ... there might be a place in the world for people like us ... Jesus' Son

He decided to go over a couple of blocks to Michael's Tavern for something cold, and as he walked beside the road he felt his anger burning up in the heat of noon, and saw himself, as he often did when he was outdoors on hot days, being forged in enormous fires for some purpose beyond his imagining. He was only walking down a street toward a barroom, and yet in his own mind he took his part in the eternity of this place. It seemed to him - it was not the first time - that he belonged in Hell, and would always find himself joyful in its midst. It seemed to him that to touch James Houston was to touch one iota of the vast grit that made the desert and hid the fires at the centre of the earth.

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

Employment in the Small Bookstore"
Twelve Poems, 1975

The dust is almost motionless
in this narrowness, this stillness,
yet how unlike a coffin
it is, sometimes letting a live one in,
sometimes out
and the air,
though paused, impends not a thing,
the silence isn't sinister,
and in fact not much goes on
at the Ariel Book Shop today,
no one weeps in the back
room full of books, old books, no one
is tearing the books to shreds, in fact
I am merely sitting here
talking to no one, no one being here,
and I am blameless,
More,
I am grateful for the job,
I am fond of the books and touch them,
I am grateful that King St. goes down
to the river, and that the rain
is lovely, the afternoon green.
If the soft falling away of the afternoon
is all there is, it is nearly
enough, just
let me hear the beautiful clear voice
of a woman in song passing
toward silence, and then
that will be all for me
at five o'clock
I will walk
down to see the untended
sailing yachts of the Potomac
bobbing hopelessly in another silence,
the small silence that gets to be a long
one when the past stops talking
to you because it is dead,
and still you listen,
hearing just the tiny
agonies of old boats
on a cloudy day, in cloudy water.
Talk to it. Men are talking to it
by Cape Charles, for th

There were stories that the tunnels went for miles. There were monsters down there, blind reptiles and insects that had never seen the light, there were hospitals and brothels, and horrible things, piles of the offal from VC atrocities, dead babies, assassinated priests.

And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.

Her midriff bare, like the denizen ... of some pampering seraglio.

After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.

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

She was a woman, a traitor, and a killer. Males and females wanted her. But I was the only one who ever could have loved her.

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

The Past just left. Its remnants, I claim, are mostly fiction. We're stranded here with the threadbare patchwork of memory, you with yours, I with mine.

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.

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.

Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.

People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar. And what are you going to do to me now? With what, exactly, would you expect to frighten me?

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.

Write naked. That means to write what you would never say.
Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it.
Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.

He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.

I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself.
Because boldness doesn't feel bold. It feels scared not brave.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines - well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads - that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco - the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me.

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.

And with each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me. And then I would remember I had a wife at home who loved me, or later that my wife had left me and I was terrirfied, or again later that I had a beautiful alcoholic girlfriend who would make me happy forever. But every time I entered the place there were veiled faces promising everything and then clarifying quickly into the dull, the usual, looking up at me and making the same mistake.

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.

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.

My habit when I've been humiliated is to go out and buy a book.

I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.

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.

Not all the people living at Beverly Home were old and helpless. Some were young but paralyzed. Some weren't past middle age but were already demented. Others were fine, except that they couldn't be allowed out on the street with their impossible deformities. They made God look like a senseless maniac. One man had a congenital bone ailment that had turned him into a seven-foot-tall monster. His name was Robert. Each day Robert dressed himself in a fine suit, or a blazer-and-trousers combination. His hands were eighteen inches long. His head was like a fifty-pound Brazil nut with a face. You and I don't know about these diseases until we get them, in which case we also will be put out of sight.

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

It's plain to you that at the time I write this, I'm not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.

I knew him, this John Smith. Once at a party he tried to sell me a gun, and later at the same party he made everyone quiet down for a few minutes because I was singing along with the radio, and he liked my voice.

With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.

I note that I've lived longer in the past now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn't mind forgetting more of it.

Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.

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.

The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in - as if he'd been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream.

Is that why I went wild over her? Because once I saw her truly? Is devotion as simple as that?

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

What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.

Everybody's got a mean side. Just don't feed it till it grows.

Frost had built on the dead grass, and it skirled beneath his feet. If not for this sound he'd have thought himself struck deaf, owing to the magnitude of the surrounding silence. All the night's noises had stopped. The whole valley seemed to reflect his shock. He heard only his footsteps and the wolf-girl's panting complaint.

The jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood.

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.

At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America - with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers in his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the dusks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.

I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.

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.

It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he'd reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he'd never be able to guess what it was.

I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become.

They started calling it The Rape, and it came to stand for everything: for coming together while falling apart; for loving each other and hating everybody else; for moving at breakneck speed while getting nowhere; for freezing in the streets and melting in the rooms of love.

When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar.

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

Completely confused as to who the real criminals were in this case, the jury had voted to wash their hands of everybody and they let him off. That had been the meaning of the conversation I'd had with him that afternoon, but I hadn't understood what was happening at all. There were many moments in the Vine like that one - where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.

...We bought heroin with the money and split the heroin down the middle. Then he went looking for his girlfriend, and I went looking for mine, knowing that when there were drugs around, she surrendered. But I was in a bad condition - drunk, and having missed a night's sleep. As soon as the stuff entered my system, I passed out. Two hours went by without my noticing. I felt I'd only blinked my eyes, but when I opened them my girlfriend and a Mexican neighbor were working on me, doing everything they could to bring me back. The Mexican was saying, "There, he's coming around now."

We lived in a tiny, dirty apartment. When I realized how long I'd been out and how close I'd come to leaving it forever, our little home seemed to glitter like cheap jewelry. I was overjoyed not to be dead. Generally th

But in the deep red event behind the stove's glass window the filament of time was never tangled, nothing had a name or a reason, everything was itself, and the things she would always know, even if you took her head away, even if you killed her, were confirmed: It catches, then burns, then blazes; it rages and sings, it wanes, it shifts and flares, it burns a little longer and then weakens, whatever it is, and goes out. But if you lay the small wood across it in the morning, it all begins again.

If you like the fields we'd walk away from the road into the fields, or we'd go fishing, if that's what you like to do. The sun would set and we'd build a fire. The trees and rocks would shrink and their shadows would grow. People don't have eyes by the light of a fire. No, that's glib and pointless. It's all glib and pointless. In the worlds that live in these tears just as much as in the real world, I'd stare at you and have no idea who you were, for hours. One word after another would get choked in my heart. I wouldn't be able to ask your name. You wouldn't be able to see my face. After a while the fire would go out, you'd be lost in the dark, and I would cry these tears.

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

Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never inside
it was a dream.

There was a part of her she hadn't yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place

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.

The movie's not over till everybody's dead.

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?

Write naked. Write in exile. Write in blood.

In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.

I knew every raindrop by its name.

Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he'd been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.

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.

Does everything you touch turn to shit? Does this happen to you every time?"
"No wonder they call me Fuckhead."
It's a name that's going to stick.

She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel.…and the entire message had no words. The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time. Yes is Now.

The angel who says, "It's time."

"Is it time?" she asked. "Does it hurt?" He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen.

"Oh, babe." The angel starts to cry. "You can't imagine," he said.

Pointless labor, useless trash, but for the bureaucrat nothing's trash until he affronts his soul by throwing it out.

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.

He thought he might as well. "There's really only one question."
"What's that?"
"Did God really kill Himself?"
Leanna wasn't smiling now. She was staring at him, but softly.
"Who are you?" she asked him.
Whatever she meant by the question, he didn't want to answer it. He wiped his face with his napkin, and in reference to the warmth of the place said, "Man.

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.

Eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination.

It's a beautiful day" – by which we meant that the weather was good. But we never say, "The weather's good," "The weather's pleasant." We say, "It's a beautiful day," "What a beautiful day.

Nobody's going to cook me and eat me, I hope."
"People don't quite understand," Michael said, and he may have been serious, "to be eaten pays a compliment to your power.

Everything is arranged," John Robertson told me.

Thank God."

I forgot to mention that we appear to have one small problem," he said.

Okay..."

Evidently it seems Winston Holder has already left this morning to the border and Gbarnga. He took a journalist in."

A journalist? Who?"

I don't know who. They thought it must be you."

But it wasn't me. I'm me," I said, though from the first hour in this country I'd begun to doubt it.

I have Lincoln Smythe's address. He'll put us right. Everything will be arranged promptly, and we'll work out your itinerary."

I thought everything was arranged," I said.

By the bare bulb hung above our straw beds I saw, far back in John Robertson's eyes, the eternal West African question: What is this guy going on about?

Naturally," he said, "but we just have to work out your itinerary."

Everything is arranged doesn't mean you should expect to get anywhere or accomplish anything. In fact, for sanity's sake, those two ideas have to be banished: the idea of getting somewhere and the idea of accomplishing something. Everything is arranged means that all is complete, the great plan of the universe is unfolding before our eyes. So eat, drink, sleep. Everything is arranged.

Survival is the foundation of triumph.

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

Who said it? – probably Confucius – "I can't beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can't free the soul of man by violence." Peace was here, peace was now. Peace promised in any other time or place was a lie.

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.

With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I'd been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen.

He had laid his head back until his scalp had 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 moaning of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And the time was gone forever.

Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.

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

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.

You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric...

We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.

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.

WE'RE ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF REALITY ITSELF. RIGHT WHERE IT TURNS INTO A DREAM

Like all men you have a religion - at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I'd hope a religion to be ...

When I reached the street I didn't know whether to go right or left. Soon I'd have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you
we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.