61+ Denis Johnson Quotes On Education, Democracy And Success

Denis Johnson is a German-American writer of fiction, poetry, and plays. He is best known for his short story collection Jesus' Son, which was adapted into a 1999 film of the same name. He is also the author of the novel Tree of Smoke, which won the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Denis Johnson on education, leadership, democracy.

Top 10 Denis Johnson Quotes

1. I knew every raindrop by its name.
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.
3. 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.
4. Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.
5. After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
6. English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
7. 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?
8. Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.
9. We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.
• What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?
• Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
• This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
• I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me...I'm the one happening.
• Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.
• Death is the mother of beauty.
• And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
• There's so much goop inside of us, man," he said, "and it all just wants to get out.
• The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.

Denis Johnson Quotes About Writing

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

If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore. — Denis Johnson

In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being. — Denis Johnson

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off. — Denis Johnson

Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it. — Denis Johnson

When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar. — 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

Denis Johnson Quotes About Stories

I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff. — Denis Johnson

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

I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more. — Denis Johnson

We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves. — Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson Quotes About Play

In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts. — 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

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

Denis Johnson Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all -- cash, booze, and a wife -- he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

I'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me. — Denis Johnson

The movie's not over till everybody's dead. — 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

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

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

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

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

We’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that — Denis Johnson

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

Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. 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

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

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

There were many moments in the Vine like that one--where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons. — Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Denis Johnson

1. Denis Johnson's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexity of life, and the power of storytelling to explore difficult topics.
2. His stories often focus on characters who are struggling with addiction, poverty, and mental illness, and how they cope with these issues.
3. Through his work, Johnson encourages readers to be more compassionate and understanding of those who are different from them, and to recognize the beauty and humanity in all people.