After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.
Denis JohnsonRead
When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects deep emotional turmoil and the complex nature of love and pain in relationships.
In this vivid imagery, the author explores the intensity of love and the pain intertwined in intimate relationships. The act of firing a pistol represents extreme emotional turmoil and conflict, suggesting that the person desires not just to hurt, but to deeply connect and transform through their suffering. The metaphor of eating a heart and giving birth from it implies a longing for profound, transformative experiences, indicating that love can be both nurturing and destructive, akin to a child's dependence on a mother, laden with both affection and potential harm.
Themes
LovePainRelationshipsIntimacyHeartbreak
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the complexities of romantic relationships.
More from Denis Johnson
All quotes →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 storm or in a cup, it owns you--we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.
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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 outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.
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If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.
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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 JohnsonRead
The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.
Denis JohnsonRead
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