99+ Denis Johnson Quotes on Desert, Words and Jesus' Son - Quotes.pub

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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.

We whizzed along down through the skeleton remnants of Iowa.

I didn’t want to get to know her very well, and didn’t want to be bridging any silences with our eyes.

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.

The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce.

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.

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.

To English it was amazing how a song will take a whole confused epoch in your life, and fashion it into something sharp and elegant with which to pierce your neck.

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

The cards were scattered on the table, face up, face down, and they seemed to foretell that whatever we did to one another would be washed away by liquor or explained away by sad songs.

Life after death, ghosts, Paradise, eternity – of course, we take all that as granted. Otherwise where’s the fun?

In those days he’d known how to sit still. He’d learned to live a good part of each day in the silence under the world. Now the world lived in his mind, it colonized his solitude like a virus, thoughts crawled, shot, rained through his meditation, and every one pierced him.

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

But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.

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.

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.

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

But come to California. Come to these canyons if you want to be driven by sacredness into the air. If you dream of the true, clear silences, if you want those silences to sing – come to California.

We stared at him and felt like old maids. He, on the other hand, was the bride of Death.

The water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God.

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

Oh, well,” Sands said, thinking that when passion stirred Major Eddie’s heart, he tended to speak in a kind of poetry – you wouldn’t do it justice to call it lying.

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.

That world! These days it’s all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?

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

Staring at his own face reflected in a cup of bitter karma. For.

If you write fiction, you’re by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don’t have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you’re not lonely anymore.

Everything they did was a secret, especially from each other.

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.

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.

Sloth kept him in bed awhile. Restlessness drove him downstairs to the tiny court behind his kitchen, where the sun made more mist. Under its warmth everything gave off ghosts. They work from the bricks, rose with a deep reluctance, disappeared.

He didn’t know what country he was in, but he was at home in the universe.

The lid, however, wouldn’t shut. The mind held back the whole sky.

Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.

There was nothing of his I wanted in particular. I wanted it all.

In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don’t know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their cliches yet full of helpless poetry.

Skip experienced no excitement. Only the lethargy and sadness of a man freezing to death.

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.

Survival is the foundation of triumph.

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.

Sands vanquished a rush of fear and said emphatically, “I’m your man, sir.” “Get in there. Have intercourse with snakes. Eat human flesh. Learn everything.” “That’s pretty broad.

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

I’ve masqueraded as a literary critic, and with a great deal more success, but criticism isn’t real – it’s not a real thing.

Psy Ops is all about unusual thinking, man. We want ideas blown up right to where they’re gonna pop. We’re on the cutting edge of reality itself. Right where it turns into a dream.

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.

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?

The coyotes sounded like hurt dogs. They agitated plainly for Christ’s return. May they not be heard.

I answered instantly, pointing out that in order to accept this proof that Elvis was in Paradise in 1958, we first have to accept life after death, Paradise, ghosts, all of that. Mark answered a couple of days later, I smile and shrug. Life after death, ghosts, Paradise, eternity – of course, we take all that as granted. Otherwise where’s the fun?

There’s nothing wrong with me” – I’m surprised I let those words out. But it’s always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.

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

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