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

#heart #mother #birth

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows. ↗

— Denis Johnson

#english

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

#dreams

Write the unpublishable...and then publish it. ↗

— Denis Johnson

#inspirational #writing #inspirational

. . . things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them. ↗

— Denis Johnson

#human #love #memory #perish #remember

When I reached the street I didn't know whether to go right or left. Soon I'd have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him. ↗

— Denis Johnson

#direction #left #life #meaning #person

She was a woman, a traitor, and a killer. Males and females wanted her. But I was the only one who ever could have loved her. ↗

— Denis Johnson

#jesus-son #love #love

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

#first #important #modern #more #mostly

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

#expectations #facts #formal #journalism #kinds

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

#finish #four #got #had #i