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We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.
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
Hell
Fondly
Purgatory
Sing
More quotes by Denis Johnson
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
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
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.
Denis Johnson
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
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
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
After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
Denis Johnson
[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
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
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
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
Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
Denis Johnson
The movie's not over till everybody's dead.
Denis Johnson
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
And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Denis Johnson
There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place
Denis Johnson
Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
Denis Johnson
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.
Denis Johnson
English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
Denis Johnson
I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
Denis Johnson
