The Largesse of the Sea Maiden Quotes

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“It's plain to you that at the time I write this, I'm not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“Three Rules To Write By

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.

Denis Johnson”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“The lid, however, wouldn't shut. The mind held back the whole sky.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“All I’d done in better than two decades was tread forward until I reached the limit of certain assumptions, and stepped off.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“Writing. It’s easy work. The equipment isn’t expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape. You don’t have to be high-functioning or even, for the most part, functioning at all. If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time, and production wouldn’t suffer. Bouts of poverty come along, anxiety, shocking debt, but nothing lasts forever. I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“Writing. It’s easy work. The equipment isn’t expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape. You don’t have to be high-functioning or even, for the most part, functioning at all. If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time, and production wouldn’t suffer. Bouts of poverty come along, anxiety, shocking debt, but nothing lasts forever. I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“It doesn’t matter. The world keeps turning. It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“Because it referred, really, to nothing at all, and yet it was actually very moving.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“The only painter I admire is God. He’s my biggest influence.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“Ellis quizzed him about his life before his arrest, his routine there at the prison, his views on the death penalty—Mason was against it—and his opinion as to an afterlife—Mason was for it.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“Tom Ellis was the last new person he’d meet, in other words, who wasn’t about to kill him.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“I wonder if you’re like me, if you collect and squirrel away in your soul certain odd moments when the Mystery winks at you, when you walk in your bathrobe and tasselled loafers, for instance, well out of your neighborhood and among a lot of closed shops, and you approach your very faint reflection in a window with words above it. The sign said “Sky and Celery.” Closer, it read “Ski and Cyclery.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“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 a lot more of it. Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folk tales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, and 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.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“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 a lot more of it.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“The day was sunny, fine for walking, brisk, and getting brisker—and in fact, as I cut a diagonal through a little plaza somewhere above Fortieth Street, the last autumn leaves leapt up from the pavement and swirled around our heads, and a sudden misty quality in the atmosphere above seemed to solidify into a ceiling both dark and luminous, and the passersby hunched into their collars, and two minutes later the gusts had settled into a wind, not hard, but steady and cold, and my hands dove into my coat pockets. A bit of rain speckled the pavement. Random snowflakes spiraled in the air. All around me, people seemed to be evacuating the scene, while across the square a vendor shouted that he was closing his cart and you could have his wares for practically nothing, and for no reason I could have named I bought two of his rat-dogs with everything and a cup of doubtful coffee and then learned the reason—they were wonderful. I nearly ate the napkin. New York!”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“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?”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“he’d revised his thinking as to reincarnation and now believed the concept to be solely metaphorical, “just another word game, even if the saints and Buddhas are playing it,” and who was I to argue about things like reincarnation? My own treatment of the matter went no farther than to pray it was a fiction, this single current addled existence of mine being vastly more than enough.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“The lines of her tears sparkled on her cheeks. "I am a prisoner here," she said. I took the chair across from her and watched her cry. I sat upright, one hand on the table's surface and the other around my drink. I felt the ecstasy of a dancer, but I kept still.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“Life after death, ghosts, Paradise, eternity--of course, we take all that as granted. Otherwise where's the fun?”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“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.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“Well," I said, "if the saints think reincarnation's a game worth playing ..." Mark said: "I mean, sure, something's happening over and over, but what? Maybe it's just the breath in and out of our lungs." I pointed out we didn't need a metaphor for breathing—"You just talked about it quite literally.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden