Denis Johnson Quotes

Every word was once a poem.

An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.

Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a "Hup two three four." They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.

We battle on in words, as always, mere words, and what's the cure? We cannot find a thing.

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

If the fire of hell is not literal, it is worse than actual fire, and if the gates of the Celestial City are not actual gold, they are far finer.

It is by metaphor that language grows.

Words are like gems to me... imagine yourself walking through a very shallow stream and picking up beautiful stones that catch your eye... that's what names are like for me.

Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

Faith is only a word, embroidered.

[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

You can taste a word.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.

People take things too literal in the Bible and it's totally wrong.

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious.

It was easier than explaining DiMaggio's use as a metaphor.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

A word only writes its night and rides its dream.