Animals had returned to what was left of the forest...clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people traveled the muddy road, leaving tracks straight up and down the middle of it...

— Denis Johnson

At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America - with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers in his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the disks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summer.

— Denis Johnson

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

— Denis Johnson

[G]I've him this much: death didn't just walk up and inhale him. He wasn't exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.

— Denis Johnson

Harold's Bow and Food Bowl bowl bowl Food food food The miracle of the heavenly restaurant mouth this great dark sad evening Suddenly they come for me in a limousine How could I have believed I was vanquished never lay slain I am the victor this parade is for meow they have led me to the doors of God Long ago and forever was in this place on the other side of eating where I am full and the empty bowl is beautiful-- from Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs

— Denis Johnson

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

He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.

— Denis Johnson

I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.

— Denis Johnson

It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he'd reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he'd never be able to guess what it was.

— Denis Johnson

Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.

— Denis Johnson