Denis Johnson Quotes

Countries like ours are full of people who have all of the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet (and at times noisy) desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside them and that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motorcars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it. . . it aches!

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

If I was to say I had a life, that would be a lie.

Why does the feeling of emptiness occupy so much space?

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.

So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there.

she was consumed by 3 simple things: drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more: youth and beauty

This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.

Thir must be less tae life than this

You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.

The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.

The loneliest people in the world are those who have exhausted pleasure and come away empty.

I was drinking a lot of bourbon. I was miserable. I was starting to get work, but it wasn't remotely satisfying. It was garbage compared to the theater I was doing.

Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.

I have been in love, and in debt, and in drink, this many and many a year.

I was standing onstage last year, and I felt like I wanted to be somewhere else. No matter how many people were out there, it all just felt like a blank sheet of paper.

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

Does the world have nothing inside but sorrow?

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Living, it's awful for me.

The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness.

Oh, what a void there is in things.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

I sat there with everything - and I had nothing.