Top 160 Denis Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I knew every raindrop by its name.”

— Denis Johnson

2. “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

3. “And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”

— Denis Johnson

4. “Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.”

— Denis Johnson

5. “We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.”

— Denis Johnson

6. “I have one ship and they call me a pirate. You have a fleet and they call you an Emperor. I can’t remember who said it.”

— Denis Johnson

7. “English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.”

— Denis Johnson

8. “I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me. Yes, a ghost. A vestige. Something remaining.”

— Denis Johnson

9. “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

10. “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

11. “After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.”

— Denis Johnson

12. “Nothing sudden is happening here. More is just suddenly being revealed.”

— Denis Johnson

13. “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

— Denis Johnson

14. “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.”

— Denis Johnson

15. “Write naked. Write in exile. Write in blood.”

— Denis Johnson

16. “If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.”

— Denis Johnson

17. “What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?”

— Denis Johnson

18. “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

19. “This wasn’t the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you – we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.”

— Denis Johnson

20. “I stayed in the library, crushed breathless by the smoldering power of all those words – many of them unfathomable – until Happy Hour. And then I left.”

— Denis Johnson

21. “She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she’d done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.”

— Denis Johnson

22. “With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who’d love me.”

— Denis Johnson

23. “He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.”

— Denis Johnson

24. “Death is the mother of beauty.”

— Denis Johnson

25. “That night I sat in a booth across from Kid Williams, a former boxer. His black hands were lumpy and mutilated. I always had the feeling he might suddenly reach out his hands and strangle me to death. He spoke in two voices. He was in his fifties. He’d wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who’d wasted only a few years.”

— Denis Johnson

26. “Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.”

— Denis Johnson

27. “You can’t burgulate a forgotten, empty house,” he said, horrified at my stupidity.”

— Denis Johnson

28. “It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.”

— Denis Johnson

29. “There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place.”

— Denis Johnson

30. “How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That’s nothing. I’d been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse.”

— Denis Johnson

31. “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

32. “There’s so much goop inside of us, man,” he said, “and it all just wants to get out.”

— Denis Johnson

33. “The Vine was like a railroad club car that had somehow run itself off the tracks into a swamp of time where it awaited the blows of the wrecking ball.”

— Denis Johnson

34. “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

35. “The sky was a bruised red shot with black, almost exactly the colors of a tattoo. Sunset had two minutes left to live.”

— Denis Johnson

36. “We’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that.”

— Denis Johnson

37. “The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them.”

— Denis Johnson

38. “The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.”

— Denis Johnson

39. “Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There’d been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn’t even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.”

— Denis Johnson

40. “It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.”

— Denis Johnson

41. “What a pair of lungs!”

— Denis Johnson

42. “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

43. “The movie’s not over till everybody’s dead.”

— Denis Johnson

44. “It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

— Denis Johnson

45. “He was in his fifties. He’d wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who’d wasted only a few years.”

— Denis Johnson

46. “It was his foreignness, inability to make himself accepted, essential loserness, that made him look away.”

— Denis Johnson

47. “The lines of her tears sparkled on her cheeks. “I am a prisoner here,” she said. I took the chair across from her and watched her cry. I sat upright, one hand on the table’s surface and the other around my drink. I felt the ecstasy of a dancer, but I kept still.”

— Denis Johnson

48. “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

49. “Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.”

— Denis Johnson

50. “It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere.”

— Denis Johnson