Top 160 Denis Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The appeal was obvious, the cleanly geometry, the assurances of physical ballistics, the organic richness of the wooden lanes and the mute servitude of the machines that raised the pins and swept away the fallen, above all the powerlessness and suspense, the ball held, the ball directed, the ball traveling away like a son, beyond hope of influence. A slow, large, powerful game. Sands.”

— Denis Johnson

102. “News had reached his ears that they planned to distribute mixtures alongside Route One and Route Twenty-two to kill the vegetation there. Depriving ambushers of cover was a good idea, he thought. But this was the loveliest country on the earth. Sorrow and war lay all over it, true, but the sickness of sorrow had never before penetrated the land itself. He didn’t like to see it poisoned.”

— Denis Johnson

103. “Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.”

— Denis Johnson

104. “For his part he sensed with despair that he wouldn’t come, no matter how long they kept at it. But this activity made him happy, he could stand here all night and offer pleasure to this other human being, this creature of form and flesh crying like an anvil.”

— Denis Johnson

105. “There’s nothing wrong with me” – I’m surprised I let those words out. But it’s always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.”

— Denis Johnson

106. “It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.”

— Denis Johnson

107. “As he expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense.”

— Denis Johnson

108. “I note that I’ve lived longer in the past now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn’t mind forgetting more of it.”

— Denis Johnson

109. “My father is dead!” As soon as he’d said it, Fiskadoro saw he’d made it true again – again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn’t simple. It wasn’t one thing, but a thousand things carrying him away to the Ocean: the work of a person’s life was to drink it.”

— Denis Johnson

110. “You’re under pressure when you produce facts. You’re working with facts in journalism, but you’re under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations.”

— Denis Johnson

111. “The lid, however, wouldn’t shut. The mind held back the whole sky.”

— Denis Johnson

112. “The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn’t yet come to light, and so we kept on in one another’s company, going to bars and having conversations.”

— Denis Johnson

113. “He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.”

— Denis Johnson

114. “I knew him, this John Smith. Once at a party he tried to sell me a gun, and later at the same party he made everyone quiet down for a few minutes because I was singing along with the radio, and he liked my voice.”

— Denis Johnson

115. “The Past just left. Its remnants, I claim, are mostly fiction. We’re stranded here with the threadbare patchwork of memory, you with yours, I with mine.”

— Denis Johnson

116. “Well,” I said, “if the saints think reincarnation’s a game worth playing... ” Mark said: “I mean, sure, something’s happening over and over, but what? Maybe it’s just the breath in and out of our lungs.” I pointed out we didn’t need a metaphor for breathing – “You just talked about it quite literally.”

— Denis Johnson

117. “Skip stared at the ranks of the players. Men who raced from the benches to collide with one another in joyful bloodshed. Who let themselves be hammered and rounded into cops and warriors and lived in a world completely inaccessible to women and children.”

— Denis Johnson

118. “I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.”

— Denis Johnson

119. “Pointless labor, useless trash, but for the bureaucrat nothing’s trash until he affronts his soul by throwing it out.”

— Denis Johnson

120. “The woman hurt me. She looked so soft and perfect, like a mannequin made of flesh, flesh all the way through.”

— Denis Johnson

121. “There were stories that the tunnels went for miles. There were monsters down there, blind reptiles and insects that had never seen the light, there were hospitals and brothels, and horrible things, piles of the offal from VC atrocities, dead babies, assassinated priests.”

— Denis Johnson

122. “He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come. That’s it. That’s the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.”

— Denis Johnson

123. “Grainier still went to services some rare times, when a trip to town coincided. People spoke nicely to him there, people recognized him from the days when he’d attended almost regularly with Gladys, but he generally regretted going. He very often wept in church. Living up the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered.”

— Denis Johnson

124. “There was nothing of his I wanted in particular. I wanted it all.”

— Denis Johnson

125. “Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, “This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.”

— Denis Johnson

126. “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

127. “Survival was a breeze that touched some and not others. Neither hope nor hopelessness had anything to do with it.”

— Denis Johnson

128. “But every time I entered the place there were veiled faces promising everything and then clarifying quickly into the dull, the usual, looking up at me and making the same mistake.”

— Denis Johnson

129. “Oh, well,” Sands said, thinking that when passion stirred Major Eddie’s heart, he tended to speak in a kind of poetry – you wouldn’t do it justice to call it lying.”

— Denis Johnson

130. “We stared at him and felt like old maids. He, on the other hand, was the bride of Death.”

— Denis Johnson

131. “Now we had a stupid silence, the kind that always descends on people who are half in the bag.”

— Denis Johnson

132. “The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, whilted 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

133. “The cards were scattered on the table, face up, face down, and they seemed to foretell that whatever we did to one another would be washed away by liquor or explained away by sad songs.”

— Denis Johnson

134. “They ran a few syringesful into me, and I felt like I’d turned from a light, Styrofoam thing into a person. I held up my hands before my eyes. The hands were as still as a sculpture’s.”

— Denis Johnson

135. “Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.”

— Denis Johnson

136. “I pushed through the door into Kelly’s. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You’d think they’d found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds.”

— Denis Johnson

137. “They’d been here twenty seconds, and already nothing was happening.”

— Denis Johnson

138. “A child, I’m miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his father’s sky. Why do you fate me to fail you?”

— Denis Johnson

139. “But come to California. Come to these canyons if you want to be driven by sacredness into the air. If you dream of the true, clear silences, if you want those silences to sing – come to California.”

— Denis Johnson

140. “In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don’t know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their cliches yet full of helpless poetry.”

— Denis Johnson

141. “Sands vanquished a rush of fear and said emphatically, “I’m your man, sir.” “Get in there. Have intercourse with snakes. Eat human flesh. Learn everything.” “That’s pretty broad.”

— Denis Johnson

142. “It seemed the two held forth on parallel tracks, confident of meeting somewhere in infinity.”

— Denis Johnson

143. “All I’d done in better than two decades was tread forward until I reached the limit of certain assumptions, and stepped off.”

— Denis Johnson

144. “To English it was amazing how a song will take a whole confused epoch in your life, and fashion it into something sharp and elegant with which to pierce your neck.”

— Denis Johnson

145. “People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen.”

— Denis Johnson

146. “Everything they did was a secret, especially from each other.”

— Denis Johnson

147. “He’d come to war to see abstractions become realities. Instead he’d seen the reverse. Everything was abstract now.”

— Denis Johnson

148. “We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.”

— Denis Johnson

149. “He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.”

— Denis Johnson

150. “Skip experienced no excitement. Only the lethargy and sadness of a man freezing to death.”

— Denis Johnson