Quote

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.

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
Belief
Doesn
Feel
Boldness
Feels
Bold
Generally
Lack
Scared
Brave

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The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
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English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
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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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Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
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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.
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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.
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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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All the modern verse plays, they're terrible they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
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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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We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.
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Death is the mother of beauty.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
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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.
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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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