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Quote by Denis Johnson

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Train Dreams

Paul Chrisman, a solitary figure, spends his life working on trains, his dreams and aspirations mirroring the vastness of the American landscape. The novel is a meditation on the American Dream, the passage of time, and the enduring power of memory. more

Author

Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson is an American writer born on July 1, 1949. His works are known for their profound psychological insights and unique narrative style, having won numerous literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. more

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“U-2200 is a heavily worn, approximately egg-shaped 1.07-meter-tall monolith of tenasserite limestone inhabited by Gua, a non-corporeal entity that claims to be the prehistoric Johorean god of forgetting how to ride a bicycle. [...] U-2200 claims to have dwelled within the stone since its carving, more than 5,000 years ago. Exactly what U-2200 did between that time and the invention of the first actual bicycle in the 19th century is a matter of some debate. Consensus among Organization academics is that U-2200 did nothing, and probably did not exist in its present form. U-2200, however, claims that the bicycle has been invented dozens of times by cultures in all parts of the globe over the course of the past 5,000 years, only for U-2200 to engulf, consume, and negate all human knowledge not only of the riding of bicycles but of the mechanism of the bicycle, before lapsing back into dormancy. It calls this “the Bicyclecycle.”

“Another weather guide connected with the moon is, that to see ‘the old moon in the arms of the new one’ is reckoned a sign of fine weather; and so is the turning up of the horns of the new moon. In this position, it is supposed to retain the water, which is imagined to be in it, and which would run out if the horns were turned down.”

“Two hundred years ago, a wise man witnessed a wonderful phenomenon in the moon: he actually beheld a live elephant there--but the unbelieving have since made all manner of fun at the good knight's expense. Take the following burlesque of this celebrated discovery as an instance. "Sir Paul Neal, a conceited virtuoso of the seventeenth century, gave out that he had discovered 'an elephant in the moon.' It turned out that a mouse had crept into his telescope, which had been mistaken for an elephant in the moon." Well, we concede that an elephant and a mouse are very much alike.”

“Il était une fois, dans la corne de l’Afrique, un forgeron qui s’appelait Ahmad. Il devait délivrer au roi sa toute dernière commande, une très belle épée à la lame étincelante et au manche en or, embellie de petites pierres de rubis d’une clarté et d’une pureté dignes d’un roi.”