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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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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
Kind
Kinds
Really
Beginning
Like
Teaching
Ones
Hear
Hate
Workshops
Two
Poem
Problem
Sentences

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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
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This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
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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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Death is the mother of beauty.
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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.
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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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In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.
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Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
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And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
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I knew every raindrop by its name.
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The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
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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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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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[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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We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
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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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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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Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
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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