My father is dead! As soon as he'd said it, Fiskadoro saw he'd made it true again--again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn't simple. It wasn't...
Is that why I went wild over her? Because once I saw her truly? Is devotion as simple as that?
If you like the fields we’d walk away from the road into the fields, or we’d go fishing, if that’s what you like to do. The sun would set and we’d build a fire. The trees and rocks would shrink and th...
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.
I have one ship and they call me a pirate. You have a fleet and they call you an Emperor. I can’t remember who said it.
How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do wor...
He’d come to war to see abstractions become realities. Instead he’d seen the reverse. Everything was abstract now.
Her zealous hope of Heaven made it hell there.
He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.
From a Berkeley Notebook'~Denis JohnsonOne changes so muchfrom moment to momentthat when one hugsoneself against the chillair at the inceptionof spring, at night,knees drawn to chin,he finds himself i...
But in the deep red event behind the stove’s glass window the filament of time was never tangled, nothing had a name or a reason, everything was itself, and the things she would always know, even if y...
And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming,...
All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.
You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric...
We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.
The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, whilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn't even plant anymore. All the false visions had been...
The coyotes sounded like hurt dogs. They agitated plainly for Christ's return. May they not be heard.
The Past just left. Its remnants, I claim, are mostly fiction. We're stranded here with the threadbare patchwork of memory, you with yours, I with mine.
It made me in all matters a fundamentalist. I didn't go to 'take it in.' I went to be convicted.