Top 160 Denis Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God.”

— Denis Johnson

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

— Denis Johnson

53. “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

54. “I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it’s also someone who’s looking back. I like that kind of double vision.”

— Denis Johnson

55. “But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.”

— Denis Johnson

56. “We Vietnamese have two philosophies to sustain us. The Confucian tells us how to behave when fate grants us peace and order. The Buddhist trains us to accept our fate even when it brings us blood and chaos.”

— Denis Johnson

57. “You bury a friend – that gives you an enemy. It calls you more deeply into the cause. Then the time comes when you kill a friend. And that might drive you away. It can also have the opposite result – to deafen you against your own voice when it wants to ask questions.”

— Denis Johnson

58. “I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself. Because boldness doesn’t feel bold. It feels scared not brave.”

— Denis Johnson

59. “If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time.”

— Denis Johnson

60. “Night again, the insects are loud, the moths are killing themselves on the lamp. Two hours ago I sat on the veranda looking out at the dusk, filled with envy for each living entity – bird, bug, blossom, reptile, tree, and vine – that doesn’t bear the burden of the knowledge of good and evil. The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.”

— Denis Johnson

61. “Generally the closest I ever came to wondering about the meaning of it all was to consider that I must be the victim of a joke.”

— Denis Johnson

62. “In fact he was no longer persuaded that blood and revolution made useful tools for altering the concepts in a person’s mind. Who said it? – probably Confucius – ” I can’t beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can’t free the soul of a man by violence.” Peace was here, peace was now. Peace promised in any other time or place was a lie.”

— Denis Johnson

63. “First I put my lips to her upper lip, then to the bottom of her pout, and then I kissed her fully, my mouth on her open mouth, and we met inside.”

— Denis Johnson

64. “Around these strange people I felt hungry. I smelled some kind of debauchery, the whiff of a potion that would banish everything plaguing me.”

— Denis Johnson

65. “The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we’d have an accident in the rain. I didn’t care. They said they’d take me all the way.”

— Denis Johnson

66. “She was resting at a table between numbers in the Greek nightclub where she was dancing. A little of the stage light touched her. She was very frail. She seemed to be thinking about something far away, waiting patiently for somebody to destroy her.”

— Denis Johnson

67. “Psy Ops is all about unusual thinking, man. We want ideas blown up right to where they’re gonna pop. We’re on the cutting edge of reality itself. Right where it turns into a dream.”

— Denis Johnson

68. “It’s a beautiful day” – by which we meant that the weather was good. But we never say, “The weather’s good,” “The weather’s pleasant.” We say, “It’s a beautiful day,” “What a beautiful day.”

— Denis Johnson

69. “I’ve masqueraded as a literary critic, and with a great deal more success, but criticism isn’t real – it’s not a real thing.”

— Denis Johnson

70. “When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn’t my life she was after. It was more. 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

71. “This life is but the childhood of our immortality.”

— Denis Johnson

72. “I didnt finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldnt work and I didnt have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.”

— Denis Johnson

73. “He was so entranced, he was so charmed, so captivated-rolled out flat, dreamed into, shone upon-that when she said his name, English started to live.”

— Denis Johnson

74. “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

75. “They needed to share one secret after another with a beautiful woman, to peel away layer after layer, mask after mask, and still find themselves worshiped.”

— Denis Johnson

76. “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

77. “The coyotes sounded like hurt dogs. They agitated plainly for Christ’s return. May they not be heard.”

— Denis Johnson

78. “Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn’t know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”

— Denis Johnson

79. “We parked under a strange sky with a faint image of a quarter-moon superimposed on it. There was a little woods beside us. This day had been dry out and hot, the buck pines and what-all simmering patientyl, but as we sat there smoking cigarettes it started to get very cold. “The summer’s over,” I said.”

— Denis Johnson

80. “Since Marco Polo, he thought, this climate has defeated Western civilization.”

— Denis Johnson

81. “I was a whimpering dog inside, nothing more than that. I looked for work because people seemed to believe I should look for work, and when I found a job I believed I was happy about it because these same people – counselors and Narcotics Anonymous members and such – seemed to think a job was a happy thing.”

— Denis Johnson

82. “The feeling that he was afraid of me was invigorating.”

— Denis Johnson

83. “Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church’s grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments – implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make.”

— Denis Johnson

84. “War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn’t it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and we constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that. I think we need to be invoking the other fellow’s gods too.”

— Denis Johnson

85. “Is that why I went wild over her? Because once I saw her truly? Is devotion as simple as that?”

— Denis Johnson

86. “But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.”

— Denis Johnson

87. “I answered instantly, pointing out that in order to accept this proof that Elvis was in Paradise in 1958, we first have to accept life after death, Paradise, ghosts, all of that. Mark answered a couple of days later, I smile and shrug. Life after death, ghosts, Paradise, eternity – of course, we take all that as granted. Otherwise where’s the fun?”

— Denis Johnson

88. “Well, it’s very much for each person to experience alone,” he said, and whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.”

— Denis Johnson

89. “When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside – jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely. We.”

— Denis Johnson

90. “And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.”

— Denis Johnson

91. “You know there is a cycle of imagining and desire, desire and death, death and birth, birth and imagining. And we have been tempted into its mouth. And it has swallowed us.”

— Denis Johnson

92. “Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never inside – it was a dream.”

— Denis Johnson

93. “I’d thought something was required of me, but I hadn’t wanted to find out what it was.”

— Denis Johnson

94. “My habit when I’ve been humiliated is to go out and buy a book.”

— Denis Johnson

95. “I know they argue about whether or not it’s right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn’t about that. It wasn’t what the lawyers did. It wasn’t what the doctors did, it wasn’t what the woman did. It was what the mother and father did together.”

— Denis Johnson

96. “Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges. but I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better 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

97. “Survival is the foundation of triumph.”

— Denis Johnson

98. “I know everything.” Heinz sputtered and fumed somewhat like an automobile himself, and said, “I’m God!” Grainier thought about how to answer. Here seemed a conversation that could go no farther.”

— Denis Johnson

99. “Her zealous hope of Heaven made it hell there.”

— Denis Johnson

100. “Sloth kept him in bed awhile. Restlessness drove him downstairs to the tiny court behind his kitchen, where the sun made more mist. Under its warmth everything gave off ghosts. They work from the bricks, rose with a deep reluctance, disappeared.”

— Denis Johnson