Already Dead Quotes

“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

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“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

“Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“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

“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

“You’ve never felt good. Your suffering protects you. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“Supposedly she’d died, but here she was again–somewhat changed, but you couldn’t kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn’t even been born.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“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

“Is that why I went wild over her? Because once I saw her truly? Is devotion as simple as that?”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“All night the dreamer travels in this region and doesn’t realize he’s asleep. The differences between the logic of that world and the logic of this waking one are vast. But they feel the same. And isn’t that how we recognize logic, by the way it feels?”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“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

“Now Van Ness claimed already to have died, more than once, in various other universes. Who can refute that? Is there any proof otherwise? Imagine a slight revision in Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return: not that at history’s end all matter collapses back to the center, Big-Bangs, and starts again identically; but that it starts again with one infinitesimal difference in the action of a single molecule— every time, and an endless number of times. When you die, your consciousness blanks out, but it resumes eons later, when the history of molecules has been revised enough to preclude your death due to those particular circumstances: the bullet hits your brain in this world, but in a later one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. You don’t mark the intervening ages—subjectively you experience nothing other than almost having died. But in fact you’ve edged into another kingdom, ruled by another king, engaging other potentialities. 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, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“Incidentally, this is the only letter I'll send— don't think I'll turn you in, don't think for a second I'd alert the authorities, I mean, fuck them, and certainly, of course, fuck you, but above everything fuck them. I've always stood for that. Admittedly not much else.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“Her midriff bare, like the denizen...of some pampering seraglio.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“For his part he sensed with despair that he wouldn’t come, no matter how long they kept at it. But this activity made him happy, he could stand here all night and offer pleasure to this other human being, this creature of form and flesh crying like an anvil.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“She took my heat. Traded it to the devil for some bauble.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“Meaning can’t change from person to person, and still be true”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“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?”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“[G]ive him this much: death didn't just walk up and inhale him. He wasn't exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic

“I pushed open the double windows and looked out onto the dark pasture. No stars, no moon, no wind. Just the head's unbelievable racket.
Something, a leaf or an ash, drifts down in front of my vision. No. Have I just seen a night bird drop dead out of the sky?
It strikes me suddenly that birds must actually, sometimes, die in midair. I've never seen this truth before—that sometimes they must enter heaven having lifted themselves halfway there. It seems such a little thing to understand, but I start shaking. I'm afraid if I try to touch something I'll pass my shimmering hand through the mirage of my life.”
― Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic