Jim Harrison Quotes

He kissed her legs until neither of them wore anything. And the hawk now perched in a tree in the woodlot could see an imprecise circle of flattened green wheat and two bodies entwined until late in the afternoon when it began to rain again. The man tried to cover the girl with the coat but she stood up, did a dance and drank more wine. Such simple events last lovers a long time. Scarcely anyone can turn their backs on the best thing that has happened to them. So she went to California for the summer and he retrieved her for the last year of school in the fall after a hundred letters both ways.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

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.

I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.

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.

There are no true monsters, only some people [...] who with regularity acted like a monster. It's still episodic. [...] It never works when you leave out even a small part of the picture.

"Cliff, a cell phone isn't a toy. It's a very lucky technical miracle for all of us. It's a prime weapon against our essential loneliness."
I can't say I've ever felt that lonely.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony.

I don't want to get married or run away. I want my free will. I just want to love someone and not get fucked over.

It's up to poets to revive the gods.

You live in a beautiful place and you don’t act like you know it.

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.

A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.

I prefer the skyline
of a shelf of books.

At heart he was a secret Quaker and football was pure violence. The coach was always telling him to “hit them harder.” The coach wanted him to put opposing players “out of commission.” He kept it to himself but wondered what the point of the “game” was if your intention was to hurt people badly.