"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 (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: A Novel)

"I knew every raindrop by its name."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son)

"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?"
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"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)

""Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.""
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son)

"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.


"
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"[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: Stories)

"English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows."
— Denis Johnson (Already Dead: A California Gothic)

"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)

"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?"
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son)

"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)

"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)

"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

"I wandered over across the hall where they were showing a short movie about vasectomies. Much later I told her that I'd actually gotten a vasectomy a long time ago, and somebody else must have gotten her pregnant. I also told her once that I had inoperable cancer and would soon be passed away and gone, eternally. But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son)

"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."
— Denis Johnson (Resuscitation of a Hanged Man)

"Love and violence-not to conquer one with the other but to live with both, that's what I've learned. Each pulling me a different way. If I relax my struggles they don't tear me in two, but lift me up."
— Denis Johnson (Already Dead: A California Gothic)

"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: Stories)

""There's so much goop inside of us, man," he said, "and it all just wants to get out.""
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"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: A Novel)

"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

"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..."
— Denis Johnson (Already Dead: A California Gothic)

"It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric..."
— Denis Johnson (Already Dead: A California Gothic)

"And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"Die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. If this were true, the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman. There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide -- and then never proven, only tested again by another attempt. And the person embarked on that series of tests, treading that trail of lives as if from boulder to boulder across the river of time -- no, out into the burning ocean of eternity -- what a mutant! Some new genesis, like a pale, poisonous daisy."
— Denis Johnson

"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."
— Denis Johnson (Already Dead: A California Gothic)

"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."
— Denis Johnson (The Name of the World)

"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

"Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she'd loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn't possibly suffer any change."
— Denis Johnson (Angels)

"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."
— Denis Johnson (Angels)

"Death is the mother of beauty."
— Denis Johnson (Angels)

"It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"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."
— Denis Johnson (Angels)

"This life is but the childhood of our immortality."
— Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke: A Novel)

"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."
— Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke: A Novel)

""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

"THE PEOPLE'S THIRST FOR FREEDOM HAS DRIVEN US TO DRINK BAD WATER."
— Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke: A Novel)

"War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn’t it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and we constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter."
— Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke: A Novel)

"WE'RE ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF REALITY ITSELF. RIGHT WHERE IT TURNS INTO A DREAM"
— Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke: A Novel)

"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?"
— Denis Johnson (Already Dead: A California Gothic)

"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)

"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 so much 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 (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"The first time I didn’t say anything, because she shot me in the mouth."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)

"...I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities. "
— Denis Johnson (The Name of the World)

"This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking - someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can't remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who've ruined their health, worshipped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved."
— Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke: A Novel)

"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: Stories)

"A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son: Stories)