Jim Harrison Quotes

damn the world and its wars, she thought. Those who start the wars never die in them. She packed hastily, had supper with Winnie

Animals spend a lot of time being still so when we do they lose their logical mistrust of us.

I must have awakened and fallen back to sleep a hundred times that night, listening to the wind rattle the palm fronds, the party noise of people jumping in the pool, the slurred shouts that the humidity and walls softened until all the words and dreams in the world became round.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Of course he wasn’t listening to what I said but to all of his imagined resonances of what I said.

Everyday I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.

These were not Methodist Indians but warriors with a lineage that owed nothing to the white man. We did not live upon the same earth that they did and we flatter ourselves when we think we understand them. To pity these men is to pity the gods.

The feathers on your chin mean that you ate the parakeet.

Tristan stood there dazed in the rain and mud with his friend embracing him in sorrow. The scout who was from their tent approached with an officer in tail. They raced to the paddock and quickly saddled three horses. The officer commanded them to stop and they knocked him aside in full gallop northward toward Calais reaching the forest by midnight. They sat still and fireless through the night and then at dawn in the fine sifting snow they crept forward in the snow and wiped it from the faces of the dozen or so dead until Tristan found Samuel, kissed him and bathed his icy face with his own tears: Samuel’s face gray and unmarked but his belly rended from its cage of ribs. Tristan detached the heart with a skinning knife and they rode back to camp where Noel melted down candles and they encased Samuel’s heart in paraffin in a small ammunition canister for burial back in Montana.

Pain (2)

...You want to give up, throw in the towel but you
can't give up because you're all you have.

Christ rose so long ago but the air
he rose through hasn't forgotten
the slight red contrail from the wounds.

people have an instinct to be useful and can’t handle the relentless everydayness of life unless they work hard. It is sheer idleness that deadens the soul and causes neuroses.

Isabel saw all their lives becoming history in units of days and nights so fatally private there was no one left for her to love.

I find it impossible not to believe that there's something in Irish blood that favors their power with words.

Rumi advised me to keep my spirit

up in the branches of a tree and not peek

out too far, so I keep mine in the very tall

willows along the irrigation ditch out back