Jim Harrison Quotes

Combien de fois avons-nous entendu dire que cinq millions d'enfants se couchent tous les soirs en ayant faim ? Sans doute moins souvent que toutes les fois où nous avons lu ou vu des articles où l'on faisait l'éloge de la richesse.

(from: Age Sixty-nine)
Often, lately, the night is a cold maw
and stars the scattered white teeth of the gods, which spare none of us. At dawn I have birds, clearly divine messengers that I don't understand
yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions.

A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven't quite found the words.

Maybe a single life doesn't amount to much but perhaps it should at least drift toward the common good.

Dad said I would always be “high minded and low waged” from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.

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 have always collected my thoughts on Sunday, a habit enforced in my childhood when my father gave up on the church and turned to my own education with an energy that must be called unpleasant.

If the Nazis had won the war the Holocaust, finally, would have been set to music, just as our victorious and bloody trek west is accompanied on film by thousands of violins and kettle drums.

Un ordinateur portable est fondamentalement un bâton utilisé par un chimpanzé pour faire sortir les délicieuses fourmis hors d'un trou dans une bûche.

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

To have reverence for life
you must have reverence for death.
The dogs we love are not taken from us
but leave when summoned by the gods.

I was on the verge of jumping into one of those holes in life out of which we emerge a bit tattered and bloody, though we remain sure nonetheless that we had to make the jump.

children, those lucky ones to whom clocks are of no consequence but who drift along on the true emotional content of time.

You can have a pretty good first line but not a strong enough thought to tag along more lines and sometimes in the middle words become bored and make war on one another. Notebooks are full of these fragments, shrapnel of our intention. Life is short on conclusions and that's why it's often a struggle to end a poem.

Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery.