Quotessence
Home / Authors / Dan Johnson Biography
Dan Johnson

Dan Johnson Biography

Baseball player

Related Quotes

“Heartache is the life force of my people, the agent that ripples eternity and causes history to arc into big crashing waves. Heartache may pass and disappear. Heartache is still there, it is merely invisible, plotting. Heartache is the constant. Heartache is the through line, the central core on which we all radiate, the agent of change. Heartache can neither be created nor destroyed, only transmuted. Heartache is the score and the game; heartache is our eternal currency.”

Heartache
Book:Brea or Tar
Create image

“I grew up in a day and age where hitting .250 in any given season made you a god. It was a smaller game back then. You had to hit smart and run well. There was mind to it. Then they put in a jackrabbit ball and it became a thing of brawn. You had to pitch the seams off the goddam thing or knock it into the stands every game if you wanted to be anyone. The people want that action and maybe you can give it to them for a time. But your fame will not last. It's how you play the game day in and day out, through cold streaks and shit-hole road trips. You better enjoy every goddam bus and rain delay and asswipe motel and old loud-mouthed manager and drop to the minors. Because that's what this is. It ain't glory. It's a long, ugly haul. And at the end of the day you may be a hero or you may be a washed up never been. That's all.”

Life And LivingBaseballBaseball Quotes
Book:Brea or Tar
Create image

“You cling to culture like an orphan drags her rag doll from foster home to foster home. It is your last soiled reminder of what you think you were. You'd rather die at the stake than adapt or evolve because change is scary. So you guard the same tired shit as if it's a precious, sacrosanct relic from the holy crusades of your ancestors when, in fact, it is a withered turn wrapped in butcher paper.”

AmericaAmerican DreamAmerican CultureAmerica Quotes
Book:Catawampusland
Create image

“We can't fix society until we fix the schools. We can't fix the schools until we fix the neighborhoods. We can't fix the neighborhoods until we fix the economy. We can't fix the economy until we fix politics. We can't fix politics until we fix the pernicious effect of basic human insecurities. We can't fix the pernicious effect of basic human insecurities until we fix society. We can't fix society until we fix the schools.”

AmericaEducationAmerican DreamAmerican CultureAmerica Quotes
Book:Catawampusland
Create image

“The American people have a nasty habit of waiting until it's far too late to start giving a shit. By and large, your average eligible voter tunes in to politics once every two or four years because they have been scared, shocked, bullied, cajoled, stimulated, seduced, suckered, or outright fear fucked by one or more extremities of the hideous mutant that is our electoral process.”

AmericaPoliticsAmerican PoliticsAmerican CultureAmerican Quotes
Book:Catawampusland
Create image

“The carnival is in full swing around us. Unspeakable depravities are occurring in the shadows behind the tent. Sinister cabals of dark wizards make blood pacts with the mutants on stage. The paranoid hear voices rich with ominous foreboding. Somewhere, someone is getting raped and it may as well be all of us. We're trying to rationalize our way out of a situation where we've been made to believe a moral stand is all that separates us from destruction. But we're fundamentally immoral people. Our morality can be summed up as such: 'I have to get mine.”

PoliticsAmerican PoliticsPolitics ObservationPolitical Quotes
Book:Catawampusland
Create image

“That word again. 'Freedom.' It is the golden tuning fork wielded by pied pipers and charlatans alike to realign a vast demographic of people who fundamentally crave simplicity. Since the birth of the steam engine and the rapid march of industrialism, a ceaseless parade of phony advocacy has tried to wield the hate and frustration of an American underclass that has been zapped and eroded time and time again by future shock. The playbook is simple: play off of differences, vilify anyone who can be made to appear as other, stress moral purity, canonize simplicity, decry any sort of establishment within convenient hating distance, code power with subtle signs of sex, and convert a foundation of fear to its stronger, more virile corollary--military power. When in doubt, capitalize on deeply ambiguous ideological symbols such as 'freedom,' re-appropriate historical moments as examples of conservative triumph, and constantly wave the red, white, and blue.”

PoliticsAmerican HistoryAmerican PoliticsAmerican Culture
Book:Catawampusland
Create image

“Here's the reality, guys: you save up for years to go 'Out West' and you spend everything you have in six months living in a roach infested hole in K-town, paying for "casting workshops" so you can meet managers and casting directors who don't give two shits about you. You cut your hair a little bit or grow a moustache and you have to get new headshots because people in Hollywood fundamentally lack imagination and can't even begin to fathom 'who you are as an actor' unless your headshot looks exactly like you do on the day of. And headshots cost $300 to shoot (on the cheap end) and $100 for make-up artists and $100 to retouch and $100 to print. Plus, you need a car to get around because mass transit in Los Angeles is a goddam joke. You need to get into class so you can learn how to unlearn all the shit you learned in college theater. Meanwhile, you're in love with the city because it's new and warm all the time and there are beautiful women everywhere. But you start getting this creeping sensation like everyone is a facade of a human being and beneath every beautiful face is spiritual rot, careerism, graft, nepotism, bull shit, lies, fakery, a need to be seen and an overwhelming whorism. But don't worry, guys, because you can always get a job working as a bartender where you can sneak booze from the well and forget for a few minutes what it's like to be on the bottom of the totem pole. That's a lot of fun, especially when you discover that cocaine means you can drink forever and not get too wasted until later. You'll get a DUI eventually, but fuck it, right? Around this time you start to get bitter. Really bitter, which you'll mistake as an 'evolution of your art.' You start looking for edgy rolls. You get a dumb haircut and try to make yourself look ugly. Maybe you hit the gym or start doing improv. Something to give you an edge. You start seeing young kids coming into town all bright eyed and bushy tailed and you say 'good luck' when you mean 'eat shit and die.' You wake up one day after endless commercial auditions that you really need to make rent but can't seem to book because you 'come off as an asshole' or don't smile enough...”

HollywoodEntertainmentLos AngelesHollywood Culture
Book:Brea or Tar
Create image

“Donald Trump is magnificently terrifying to reasonable Americans because his popularity, win or lose, illuminates a massive stratum of voting, gun-toting Americans who want desperately to be told that their binary values are valid. They want someone to enunciate for them what they know in their heart of hearts: that they and their prejudices and their lust for violence and their stalwart refusal to take part in a complex world of political moving parts puts them in league with the men who waited for the British, guns in hand at Concord Bridge.”

AmericaTrumpAmerican History2016Trump Resistance MovementAmerican Politics 2016
Book:Catawampusland
Create image

“It must be nice to sit back in your study and look at your Thomas Jefferson biographies and think to yourself, 'thank God we're finally killing this big government leviathan" without having to reconcile the fact that the kill off isn't elevating you, the common man, to new autonomy. It's facilitating the enshrinement of extremely wealthy jerk off ideologues who see the world as something to be sold off to the highest bidder. Big gub'ment in the hands of presumptuous elites? No thanks. The world turned into a regulation free marketplace with no avenue for recourse against the profit-at-any-cost set? Double no thanks.”

AmericaAmerican CultureAmerica QuotesAmerican Dream Love
Book:Catawampusland
Create image

“Don't assume your elected officials have your best interest in mind. Read the entire book before you see the movie. Stop Instagramming your goddam twenty-dollar quinoa salad. Don't buy that new pair of pants. Go on a hike instead of watching the game. Don't get your history from the Walt Disney Company. Seek authenticity at whatever cost. Take difficult journeys of body and mind for no reason other than proving to yourself that they are possible. Double check the facts you take for granted. Form your own well-researched opinions. Take great pains not to add any more heartache to the world. Strive to see the impact of your actions as they echo in the universe beyond.”

AmericaPhilosophy Of LifeAmerican CultureAmerica Quotes
Book:Catawampusland
Create image