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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: 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.

alcohol, booze, dark, sad

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.

caring, direction, left, life, meaning, person, right, street

It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he’d reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he’d never be able to guess what it was.

change, revelation, self

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.

abortion, denis, dirty, jesus, johnson, son, wedding

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.

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.

addiction, conflict, drugs

[G]ive him this much: death didn’t just walk up and inhale him. He wasn’t exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.

death-and-dying

Animals had returned to what was left of the forest…clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people traveled the muddy road, leaving tracks straight up and down the middle of it…

animals, bears, butterflies, forest, trees

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

death, human, love, memory, perish, remember, remembrance

Harold’s Bow and FoodBowl bowl bowl bowlFood food food foodThe miracle of the heavenly restaurantI mouth thisgreat dark sad eveningSuddenly they come for me in a limousineHow could I have believed I was vanquishedI never lay slain Iam the victor this parade is for meNow they have led me to the doors of GodLong ago and foreverI was in this placeon the other side of eatingwhere I am full and the emptybowl is beautiful– from Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs

dogs, grief, poetry, unleashed

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.

With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I’d been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen.

frustration, hope, thoughts, unforeseen, words