238 Quotes by Denis Johnson

It’s a beautiful day” – by which we meant that the weather was good. But we never say, “The weather’s good,” “The weather’s pleasant.” We say, “It’s a beautiful day,” “What a beautiful day.

The lid, however, wouldn't shut. The mind held back the whole sky.

I knew that, but he didn’t, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.

When I reached the street I didn't know whether to go right or left. Soon I'd have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.

Harold's Bow and FoodBowl bowl bowl bowlFood food food foodThe miracle of the heavenly restaurantI mouth thisgreat dark sad eveningSuddenly they come for me in a limousineHow could I have believed I was vanquishedI never lay slain Iam the victor this parade is for meNow they have led me to the doors of GodLong ago and foreverI was in this placeon the other side of eatingwhere I am full and the emptybowl is beautiful-- from Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs

All of this while I left lifted by a strange new medium, a strange element--I now tell you that I was newly buoyant in a brighter life. In the midst of a hymn, God had disappeared. It was like waking from a nightmare in which I'd been paralyzed. Like discovering that gravity itself had been only a bad dream.

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream.

For many minutes before she showed herself, he felt her moving around the place. He detected her presence as unmistakably as he would have sensed the shape of someone blocking the light through a window, even with his eyes closed.