Jim Harrison Quotes

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.

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

It didn't work to try to write about sex, doom, death, time, and the cosmos when you were thinking about a massive plate of spaghetti and meatballs.

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

When I was a stray dog in New York City in 1957, trying to eat on a buck a day while walking thousands of blocks in that human forest I thought was enchanted, not wanting to miss anything but missing everything because at nineteen dreams daily burst the brain, dismay the senses, the interior weeping drowning your steps, your mind an underground river running counter to your tentative life. “Our body is a molded river,” said wise Novalis. Bloody brain and heart, also mind and soul finally becoming a single river, flowing in a great circle, flowing from darkness to blessed darkness, still wondering above all else what kind of beast am I?

I began walking at your age just because the natural world seemed to absorb the poison in me.

Take courage, the earth is all that lasts.

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.

keep getting asked by letter and on the street by Jane and John Does dressed in spandex how they can prepare simple “gourmet” dinners in ten minutes so as to prolong, presumably, their cross-training and spritzer-drinking binges, massage and colonic appointments, drumming and marriage-counseling sessions, and tarot-card swap clubs. An easy answer here. Scoop ample quantities of Skippy on two paper plates. Handcuff each other and then slam your faces down into the plates with gusto. Good for the gluteus maximus. And it will bring you together at the sink, plus you won’t have to violate your space by answering the phone. Back to the

I’m hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don’t know what:
not the usual undiscovered bird in the cold
snowy willows, garishly green and yellow

What could it be, this astonishment,
but falling into a liquid mirror
to finally understand that the purpose
of earth is earth? It’s plain as night.
She’s willing to sleep with us a little while.

I have this sense of being a prematurely old man in a quarrel with himself over the worth of his life, a hopelessly bullshit notion.

It was usually not the big things that destroyed marriages but the day-to-day treating each other poorly.

How could all this happen when there was an ocean?

I followed all the rules - man's and God's. And you... followed none of them and they all loved you more

The memory
is the not-quite-living museum of our lives.
Sometimes its doors are insufferably wide open
with black stars in a grey sky, and horses
clattering in and out, our dead animals resting here
and there but often willing to come to life again
to greet us, parents and brothers and sisters sit
at the August table laughing while they eat twelve
fresh vegetables from the garden. Rivers, creeks, lakes
over which birds funnel like massive schools of minnows.
In memory the clocks have drowned themselves, leaving
time to the life spans of trees. The world of our lives
comes unbidden as night.