"Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it."
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Quote collection
Denis Johnson quotes (page 3 of 4)
63 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?"
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"With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me."
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"Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine."
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"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."
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"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."
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"If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having."
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"Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges. but I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better 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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being."
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"Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?"
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"I hate two kinds of sentences you hear in workshops, the ones beginning "I really like ..." and the ones beginning "My problem with this poem is ...""
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"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."
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"The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive."
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"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."
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"In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being."
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"[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."
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"Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the "Ten Thousand Things"? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you eve know the difference?"
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