Quotes from Jim Harrison

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

A mood can be a mud puddle to be jumped 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 lean against the rail and think there much be such a thing as beautiful anxiety.

Lift up your dark heart and sing a song about how time drifts past you like the gentlest, almost imperceptible breeze. — Jim Harrison, from "Cold Poem," Saving Daylight . (Copper Canyon Press 2006)

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

But then that's an appropriate response to death?' I interrupted. 'There isn't a singular response. You keep on truckin', as that cartoonist Crumb said. You're probably having a thousand responses a day because your brain simply can't stop trying to comprehend what has happened to you. It's the largest question mark we deal with in life and no responses will make it go away. We envy the devout who experience the pain but have a surefire explanation.

How can I be lost when I've never been found?

Pancakes with a slice of ham on top and three eggs on the slice of ham.

Some nights are three nights long, some days a mere noon hour, then whistled back to work, the heart dredging sludge.

people have an instinct to be useful and can't handle the relentless everydayness of life unless they work hard. It is sheer idleness that deadens the soul and causes neuroses.

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

All our progress of luxury and knowledge . . . we have not been lifted by as much as an inch above the level of the darkest ages . . . The last hundred years have wrought no change in the passions, the cruelties, and the barbarous impulses of mankind. There is no change from the savagery of the Middle Ages. We enter a new century equipped with every wonderful device of science and art but the pirate, the savage, and the tyrant still survives.

Life is short. Why not be familiar with all of it?

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

I did not want to live out my life in the strennous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tic-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foilbles...

It seemed altogether right to him that they would drive through the small village of Paradise. It would be hard to find someone less demanding of life than Brown Dog and his current position was beyond his most strenuous ambitions.

To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.

Nous sommes imprégnés de cynisme, d'explications psychologiques ou autres, mais la vie est toujours là, ainsi que son essence inacessible, son cycle aussi sûrement installé qu'autrefois.

Fast food is zoo food.

Un ordinateur portable est fondamentalement un bâton utilisé par un chimpanzé pour faire sortir les délicieuses fourmis hors d'un trou dans une bûche.

Combien de fois avons-nous entendu dire que cinq millions d'enfants se couchent tous les soirs en ayant faim ? Sans doute moins souvent que toutes les fois où nous avons lu ou vu des articles où l'on faisait l'éloge de la richesse.

Treasure what you find already in your pocket, friend.

Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons of greed and my imperishable stupidity.