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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

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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
Soul
Whole
Intellect
Heart
Parts
Mind
Lived
Moment
Moments
Care
Body

More quotes by Denis Johnson

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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.
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Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
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In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.
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We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
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The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
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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.
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This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
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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.
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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.
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English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.
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Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
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I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
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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.
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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.
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Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
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