238 Quotes by Denis Johnson

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.

Sands vanquished a rush of fear and said emphatically, “I’m your man, sir.” “Get in there. Have intercourse with snakes. Eat human flesh. Learn everything.” “That’s pretty broad.

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.

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.

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.

Life after death, ghosts, Paradise, eternity – of course, we take all that as granted. Otherwise where’s the fun?

News had reached his ears that they planned to distribute mixtures alongside Route One and Route Twenty-two to kill the vegetation there. Depriving ambushers of cover was a good idea, he thought. But this was the loveliest country on the earth. Sorrow and war lay all over it, true, but the sickness of sorrow had never before penetrated the land itself. He didn’t like to see it poisoned.

First I put my lips to her upper lip, then to the bottom of her pout, and then I kissed her fully, my mouth on her open mouth, and we met inside.

I pushed through the door into Kelly’s. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You’d think they’d found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds.