Denis Johnson Quotes

I was lying, but I wanted to rouse him. I have an inborn urge to contradict; my whole life has been a mere chain of sad and futile opposition to the dictates of either heart or reason. The presence of an enthusiast makes me as cold as a midwinter's day, and, I believe, frequent association with a listless phlegmatic would make me an impassioned dreamer.

Wars break things; they break stories.

I struggle if I have chaos around me, but at the same time, if I don't have it, I'm uncomfortable. It's a strange thing: If I don't have chaos, I create it.

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

When everything is perfectly orderly and understandable, there has to be one thing that puts everything into question.

A bull in just about any shop is gonna be a mess.

The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.

Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.

Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.

I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.

So many humans. So many colours. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-coloured clouds, beating, like black hearts. And then. There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone.

We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.

Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone

Babe, you've destroyed a car, burned down two buildings, stapled a guy's nuts, and you have sixteen stitches in your leg. Take a night off. Have a glass of wine, watch some television, and go to bed early." -Ranger

I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.

I haven't got a heart: only the former site of one, with a monument there to say that it has been removed and the area it occupied turned into a public garden, in pursuance of the slum-clearance scheme.

Your soul is like the souls of a thousand monkeys on crack, all smushed together.

For the political world, I have come to believe, is fundamentally beyond anyone's control, yet we all go on as though it were a kind of vehicle that only needs a change of drivers in order to steer it away from its frequent hair-raising visits to the edge of the cliff.

It is said that the greatest cruelty is drawn from those with the kindest hearts.

There are people who...tell you that the light in your heart is a weakness. Don't believe it! It's an old tactic of cruel people to kill kindness in the name of virtue.