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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

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Denis Johnson
Age: 67 †
Born: 1949
Born: July 1
Died: 2017
Died: May 24
Actor
Essayist
Film Actor
Musician
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
München
Denis Hale Johnson
Dionysius Johnson
Dennis Johnson
Right
Came
Overhead
Heart
Feeling
Helplessness
Way
Face
Burst
Like
Faces
Nostalgia
Lumbering
World
Lost
Touching
Indoors
Feelings
Grown
Piercing
Past
Suddenly
Constellations
Everything
Childhood
Outdoors

More quotes by Denis Johnson

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I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.
Denis Johnson
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I hate two kinds of sentences you hear in workshops, the ones beginning I really like ... and the ones beginning My problem with this poem is ...
Denis Johnson
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Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
Denis Johnson
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Death is the mother of beauty.
Denis Johnson
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Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved of how she'd loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that love like theirs couldn't possibly suffer any change.
Denis Johnson
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I'll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.
Denis Johnson
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In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.
Denis Johnson
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Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
Denis Johnson
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The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
Denis Johnson
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After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
Denis Johnson
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I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it.
Denis Johnson
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The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
Denis Johnson
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That world! These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?
Denis Johnson
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There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place
Denis Johnson
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English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
Denis Johnson
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She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.
Denis Johnson
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All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.
Denis Johnson
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Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.
Denis Johnson
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[The doctor] peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk - that is, me - standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face. 'What seems to be the trouble?' he asked.
Denis Johnson
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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