Jim Harrison Quotes

Sitting there on the deck during intermittent periods of dozing I thought that it’s really hard on a soul to admit how much of life we have spent being full of shit.

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.

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 need the solidity of a whole book because life often doesn't cohere for me, I mean my perception of life, and I need to find some bedrock however temporary. It's like books help me glue the parts of my life together into an acceptable whole.

What will I die with in my hand?
A paintbrush (for houses), an M15
a hammer or ax, a book a gavel,
a candlestick
tiptoeing upstairs.
What will I hold or will I
be caught with this usual thing
that I want to be my heart but
it is my brain and I turn it
over and over and over.

In 1958 a friend in San Francisco burned out his veins shooting up hot paregoric, a cheap high. It’s safer for me to continue smoldering just below the temperature of actual flame wondering if there’s a distant land where life freely flows like a river. Years ago in a high green pasture near timberline I watched a small black bear on its back rolling back and forth and shimmying to scratch its back, pawing the air with pleasure, not likely wanting to be anywhere or anyone else.

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.

I suppose poor Adams never recovered from the suicide of his wife, though it is arguable whether anyone ever truly recovers from anything.

Young people seem not to know that they are going to get old, but older people know that they are not going to become young again.

The heart wants life so much and the brain is shocked at the approach of death. The soldier always thinks it will be someone else, the man before or behind him, or hopefully no one he knows will ever die.

He had been foolish enough to believe that as he recovered over the past few months the world might be recovering with him

The days are stacked against what we think we are.

Just start at page one and write like a son of a bitch.” — Jim Harrison

Elaborate is the courtliness
of the imagination, on one sore knee
before beauty.

He gave up quickly trying to attune the experience to a language construct, as if life were an especially filthy mirror and speechless love cleansed this mirror and made life not only bearable but something lived with eagerness, energy, an expectancy whose pleasure didn’t depend on fatality.