Jim Harrison Quotes

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.

"Pourquoi devrais-je consacrer ce qui me reste de courage et d'énergie, sans parler de mon temps, à écrire sur les déprédations écologiques, alors qu'il suffit à toute personne moyennement intelligente de se pencher par la fenêtre pour constater, hormis en de très rares lieux, à quel point nous avons souillé notre nid ? Cette perception est parfois insupportable à certains d'entre nous, comme si nous étions condamnés à porter durant toute notre vie le pesant et répugnant havresac de ce savoir. Cette prise de conscience peut très bien entamer notre bonheur, troubler notre sommeil et nos mariages, gâcher nos promenades quotidiennes et jsuqu'à la grace éphémère d'une réalité implacable. Ce savoir se résume toujours dans la dureté de "ce qui est" comparé à "ce qui aurait pu être"."

As a geezer one grows tired of the story of Sisyphus. Let that boulder stay where it is and, by its presence, exactly where it wished to be, but then I’m old enough to have forgotten what the boulder stood for? I think of all of the tons of junk the climbers have left up on Everest, including a few bodies. Even the pyramids, those imitation mountains, say to the gods, “We can do it too.” Despite planes you can’t get off the earth for long. Even the dead meat strays behind, changing shape, the words drift into the twilight across the lake. I’m not bold enough to give a poetry reading while alone far out in the desert to a gathering of saguaro and organ-pipe cactus or listen to my strophes reverberate off a mountain wall. At dawn I sat on a huge boulder near Cave Creek deep in the Chiracahuas and listened to it infer that it didn’t want to go way back up the mountain but liked it near the creek where gravity bought its passage so long ago. Everest told me to get this crap off my head or stay at home and make your own little pyramids.

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.

"The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense." from The Beast God Forgot to Invent

Perhaps swimming was dancing in the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and bluegills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread.

Beware O wanderer, the road is walking too.

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

They merged again one evening sitting on the porch swing watching fireflies and the thousands of stars above them, idly moving the swing back and forth with their feet. The night was unbearably beautiful with the constellations speaking their own strange language to each other. He told her he thought it might be the uninvented language used by Jesus and the Buddha to speak to each other.

Some of our strangest actions are also our most deeply characteristic: secret desires remain weak fantasies unless they pervade a will strong enough to carry them out.

He waved before she could respond, turning and walking out the door where a guard waited. In her throat a sob married a scream and became nothing.

A sonic boom crushes a baby mink's skull. We know that. Isn't it enough?

Never before have the American people had their noses so deeply in one another's business. If I announce that I and eleven other diners shared a thirty-seven-course lunch that likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon, Those of a critical nature will let their minds run in tiny, aghast circles of condemnation. My response to them is that none of us twelve disciples of gourmandise wanted a new Volvo. We wanted only lunch and since lunch lasted approximately eleven hours we saved money by not having to buy diner. The defense rests.

Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.

I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony. … A lot of good fiction is sentimental. … The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. … I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.