Quote

We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.

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
Story
Tell
Stories
Whole
Always

More quotes by Denis Johnson

Image
English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
Denis Johnson
Image
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
Image
I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
Denis Johnson
Image
Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
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
All the modern verse plays, they're terrible they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
Denis Johnson
Image
Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.
Denis Johnson
Image
Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
Denis Johnson
Image
The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
Denis Johnson
Image
There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place
Denis Johnson
Image
This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
Denis Johnson
Image
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
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
Image
Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.
Denis Johnson
Image
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
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
If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.
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
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
Death is the mother of beauty.
Denis Johnson