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 nois...
Everybody’s got a mean side. Just don’t feed it till it grows.
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 n...
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?
Are you hearing unusual sounds or voices? the doctor asked.
And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
AFTER MAYAKOVKSY by Denis JohnsonIt's after one. You're probably alone.All night the moon rings like a telephonein an empty booth above our separateness.Now is the hour one answers. I am home.Hello, m...
I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities.
You bury a friend—that gives you an enemy. It calls you more deeply into the cause. Then the time comes when you kill a friend. And that might drive you away. It can also have the opposite result—to d...
Write naked. That means to write what you would never say.
With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.
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 th...
Well, it’s very much for each person to experience alone, he said, and whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.
We parked under a strange sky with a faint image of a quarter-moon superimposed on it. There was a little woods beside us. This day had been dry out and hot, the buck pines and what-all simmering pati...
Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or ou...
This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a...
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 n...
This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
There’s nothing wrong with me—I’m surprised I let those words out. But it’s always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.
The woman hurt me. She looked so soft and perfect, like a mannequin made of flesh, flesh all the way through.