Jim Harrison Quotes

I also refused the family tradition of Yale and enrolled instead at Michigan State University and then he knew that he had truly lost me, not that he seemed to care.

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.

"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"."

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.

Death steals everything except our stories.

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 hadn't noticed the green of summer enough and now the colors were gray and white and black.

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.

Christ rose so long ago but the air
he rose through hasn't forgotten
the slight red contrail from the wounds.

While it is a truism that man has not learned much more than the sexual act, and that fire burns when you stick your hand into it, it behooves the scholar to immerse himself in the analyses of the problem, rather than the problem itself.

My heart must open to the cosmos with no langauage unless we invent it moment by moment in order to breathe.

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.

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

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.

How could all this happen when there was an ocean?