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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
Fondly
Purgatory
Sing
Hell

More quotes by Denis Johnson

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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 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 ...
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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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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.
Denis Johnson
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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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After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
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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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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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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
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And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Denis Johnson
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This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
Denis Johnson
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I knew every raindrop by its name.
Denis Johnson
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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.
Denis Johnson
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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.
Denis Johnson
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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.
Denis Johnson
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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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English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
Denis Johnson
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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?
Denis Johnson
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The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.
Denis Johnson
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We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
Denis Johnson