Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
World
Lost
Touching
Indoors
Feelings
Grown
Piercing
Past
Suddenly
Constellations
Everything
Childhood
Outdoors
Right
Came
Overhead
Heart
Feeling
Helplessness
Way
Face
Burst
Like
Faces
Nostalgia
Lumbering

More quotes by Denis Johnson

Image
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?
Denis Johnson
Image
I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. 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.
Denis Johnson
Image
Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
Denis Johnson
Image
And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Denis Johnson
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
Denis Johnson
Image
This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
Denis Johnson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Denis Johnson
Image
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
Image
We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
Denis Johnson
Image
Death is the mother of beauty.
Denis Johnson
Image
In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.
Denis Johnson
Image
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
Image
I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
Denis Johnson
Image
The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
Denis Johnson
Image
I knew every raindrop by its name.
Denis Johnson
Image
Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the Ten Thousand Things? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you eve know the difference?
Denis Johnson