238 Quotes by Denis Johnson

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.

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.

Survival was a breeze that touched some and not others. Neither hope nor hopelessness had anything to do with it.

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?

When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn’t my life she was after. It was more. 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.

You bury a friend – that gives you an enemy. It calls you more deeply into the cause. Then the time comes when you kill a friend. And that might drive you away. It can also have the opposite result – to deafen you against your own voice when it wants to ask questions.

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.

It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.

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