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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fda36f2 | I said I kicked a French chicken in the stomach once." "Huh?" "It said, 'Oeuf.'" "What is that?" "It's a joke. Do you want to hear another, or have you already had un oeuf?" | joke | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 1830de8 | I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| b755d61 | The scene before her flattened, lost one of its dimensions, and the noise dribbled irrelevantly down its face. Something was coming. This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking--someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can't remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, t.. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 0533b96 | 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. | words thoughts hope unforeseen | Denis Johnson | |
| ce3d6c2 | Like all men you have a religion - at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I'd hope a religion to be... | Denis Johnson | ||
| 276932b | Since Marco Polo, he thought, this climate has defeated Western civilization. | Denis Johnson | ||
| baf389a | You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric... | Denis Johnson | ||
| cd24060 | His elbows cracked loudly when he straightened his arms, and something hitched and snapped in his right shoulder when he moved it the wrong way; a general stiffness of his frame worked itself out by halves through most mornings, and he labored like an engine through the afternoons, but he was well past thirty-five years, closer now to forty, and he really wasn't much good in the woods anymore. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 6e7026b | The first time I didn't say anything, because she shot me in the mouth. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 8e76dc1 | If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that. | Denis Johnson | ||
| c2df97e | It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there. | Denis Johnson | ||
| f5ec1e9 | There's been a lie told. I've told it. I'm going to let the truth reclaim me. If I can't survive that process, so be it. | Denis Johnson | ||
| be3326d | Everything is arranged," John Robertson told me. Thank God." I forgot to mention that we appear to have one small problem," he said. Okay..." Evidently it seems Winston Holder has already left this morning to the border and Gbarnga. He took a journalist in." A journalist? Who?" I don't know who. They thought it must be you." But it wasn't me. I'm me," I said, though from the first hour in this country I'd begun to doubt it. I have Lincoln S.. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 9250b82 | Three Rules To Write By Write naked. That means to write what you would never say. Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it. Write in exile as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail. Denis Johnson | Denis Johnson | ||
| b17fde4 | Who said it? - probably Confucius - "I can't beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can't free the soul of man by violence." Peace was here, peace was now. Peace promised in any other time or place was a lie." -- | Denis Johnson | ||
| 3cefbed | Survival is the foundation of triumph. | Denis Johnson | ||
| cf34f76 | All of this while I left lifted by a strange new medium, a strange element--I now tell you that I was newly buoyant in a brighter life. In the midst of a hymn, God had disappeared. It was like waking from a nightmare in which I'd been paralyzed. Like discovering that gravity itself had been only a bad dream. | life gravity nightmare | Denis Johnson | |
| 70e604a | Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be? | Denis Johnson | ||
| f84efb8 | He had laid his head back until his scalp had contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses, and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself h.. | time locomotive sound | Denis Johnson | |
| 6c6fa25 | Maybe, when you hear the name "Beverly," you think of Beverly Hills--people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money." | money | Denis Johnson | |
| 84bb9ed | The coyotes sounded like hurt dogs. They agitated plainly for Christ's return. May they not be heard. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 49a0f15 | Now Van Ness claimed already to have died, more than once, in various other universes. Who can refute that? Is there any proof otherwise? Imagine a slight revision in Nietzsche's myth of eternal return: not that at history's end all matter collapses back to the center, Big-Bangs, and starts again identically; but that it starts again with one infinitesimal difference in the action of a single molecule-- every time, and an endless number of .. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 88574c0 | 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. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 0eedc92 | Love and violence-not to conquer one with the other but to live with both, that's what I've learned. Each pulling me a different way. If I relax my struggles they don't tear me in two, but lift me up. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 92247c6 | We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one. | vietnam-war peace | Denis Johnson | |
| 561d55a | For many minutes before she showed herself, he felt her moving around the place. He detected her presence as unmistakably as he would have sensed the shape of someone blocking the light through a window, even with his eyes closed. | Denis Johnson | ||
| b99c2e2 | From a Berkeley Notebook' ~Denis Johnson One changes so much from moment to moment that when one hugs oneself against the chill air at the inception of spring, at night, knees drawn to chin, he finds himself in the arms of a total stranger, the arms of one he might move away from on the dark playground. Also, it breaks the heart that the sign revolving like a flame above the gas station remembers the price of gas, but forgets entirely this .. | Denis Johnson | ||
| ebd8314 | Skip stared at the ranks of the players. Men who raced from the benches to collide with one another in joyful bloodshed. Who let themselves be hammered and rounded into cops and warriors and lived in a world completely inaccessible to women and children. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 2ac4cf5 | For his part he sensed with despair that he wouldn't come, no matter how long they kept at it. But this activity made him happy, he could stand here all night and offer pleasure to this other human being, this creature of form and flesh crying like an anvil. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 40d478b | If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I'd certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 852a496 | FH: All these... weirdos, and me... getting a little better every day right in the middle of 'em. I had never known... I had never even imagined for a heartbeat that... there might be a place in the world for people like us...Jesus' Son | Denis Johnson | ||
| ead004d | Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You're sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don't do the women, you don't kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don't care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don't care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the a.. | Denis Johnson | ||
| cb1ffd1 | In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don't know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their cliches yet full of helpless poetry. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 6399038 | News had reached his ears that they planned to distribute mixtures alongside Route One and Route Twenty-two to kill the vegetation there. Depriving ambushers of cover was a good idea, he thought. But this was the loveliest country on the earth. Sorrow and war lay all over it, true, but the sickness of sorrow had never before penetrated the land itself. He didn't like to see it poisoned. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 21d6c06 | As he expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 0dd52df | Frost had built on the dead grass, and it skirled beneath his feet. If not for this sound he'd have thought himself struck deaf, owing to the magnitude of the surrounding silence. All the night's noises had stopped. The whole valley seemed to reflect his shock. He heard only his footsteps and the wolf-girl's panting complaint. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 2da411a | Cherry Loot told Sergeant Burke, "I'm gonna make the best of this fuck-a-monkey show. Don't mean fuck to me if it's illegal, unjustified, and sinful. Today we're heroes, tomorrow we're the Nazis. You never know. Nobody on this ball knows shit." It was an attitude refreshing if not outright inspiring." | Denis Johnson | ||
| 83c5d4b | I stayed in the library, crushed breathless by the smoldering power of all those words - many of them unfathomable - until Happy Hour. And then I left. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 9e7fc6a | eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 807a443 | Supposedly she'd died, but here she was again-somewhat changed, but you couldn't kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn't even been born. | Denis Johnson | ||
| 461e4f6 | Over a quarter of a century ago she and Vernon had made a household for almost a year, in a tiny rooftop flat on the rue de Seine. There were always damp towels on the floor then, and cataracts of her underwear tumbling from drawers she never closed, a big ironing board that was never folded away, and in the one overfilled wardrobe dresses , crushed and shouldering sideways like commuters on the metro. Magazines, makeup, bank statements, be.. | Ian McEwan | ||
| d231a8f | The thing about Satan is that he's amazingly sophisticated. He puts a stupid idea like satanic whatever, abuse, into people's minds, then he lets it get disproved so everyone thinks that he doesn't exist after all, and then he's free to do his worst. | Ian McEwan | ||
| ad71cf9 | Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.' 'And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead. | women | Jeanette Winterson | |
| 92b71d1 | Anyway, it's best not to think about them, as if you do it makes the discussions with the other lawyers, all their advice and all that they do manage to achieve, seem so unpleasant and useless, I had that experience myself, just wanted to throw everything away and lay at home in bed and hear nothing more about it. But that, of course, would be the stupidest thing you could do, and you wouldn't be left in peace in bed for very long either. | Franz Kafka |