Quotes from Jim Harrison

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

Søren Kierkegaard

The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change.

When you leave, you can leave a lot behind. Simple as that. And when you return the bad stuff has all disappeared in your absence because you were keeping it alive.

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

There can be a wonderful substratum of thinking going on beneath the banal tonnage of human behavior. Perhaps

language was a convenience of the heart, not something to bludgeon people with.

It was today—rather yesterday I think—that he told me it was important not to accept life as a brutal approximation.

This sentence cribbed from the back of a cereal box (organic flax and raisin bran) is not the less poignant for its source.

For years now I've found the Earth haunted. Azoological beasts rage in untraceable configurations. They're called governments. Wounds made that never heal on every acre and covered with the scar tissue of our living existence. The argument at bedrock: I don't want to live on Earth but I don't want to die.

There's always some smart ass Englishmen coming over here and telling us we're mean and vulgar. I agree. But they showed their hand way back during the Irish Potato Famine as instinctual Nazis.

There is an impulse for vengeance among certain men south of the border that leaves even the sturdiest Sicilian gasping for fresh air.

I suppose in antique Marxist terms we are lavishly paid because we are perfect tools for the class even higher up, those who own the ballpark. You can occasionally have some sympathy for those frequently unhappy souls with big inheritances from birth. This was fate in which the sense of victimization is always possible. But my own class is undeserving of a mote, a mite, a filament, an iota of sympathy. We are self-made barkers, toy dogs, prime weenies.

Given intelligence, success in any area has always struck me as a matter of the level of attention, excluding the arts, of course, which seem to be involved in a mystery known only to their practitioners, if, indeed, they know themselves. You can read a Chekhov story, a Shakespeare sonnet, or listen to a Mozart sonata a dozen times and you'll still be left twiddling your thumbs in mute admiration.

At my cabin I got so jumpy after saving my young heroine from three older men who resembled my friends that I flipped and conceived of a highly illegal meal, a thirty-pound elephant's asshole shipped FedEx from Zimbabwe, cooked for three days in a rock-lined fire hole in a bleached gunnysack soaked in 151 rum, to which is added thirteen pounds of garlic and an equal amount of fresh hot chiles. Serve with plain white rice. A Bordeaux is a possibility.

I had met Jack Kerouac a couple of times and it mystified me that his recent success with On the Road meant only that he had freedom to become hopelessly drunk.

The language I wanted from him did not exist in his world.

Shakespeare and a very few others qualified but thousands and thousands of others dropped into the void without a sound.

I have always collected my thoughts on Sunday, a habit enforced in my childhood when my father gave up on the church and turned to my own education with an energy that must be called unpleasant.

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.

Nothing so much torments a geezer as the thought of the unlived life.

I don't ask myself if I did what I set out to do. The calling was for a life and the junctures between one work and another were often not that explicit, the future only an abstraction we pull ourselves toward with, once again, the false geometry of days and nights, months and years, an illusion in the face of the continuum that makes up our lives.

She awoke early and figured out the room coffeepot. She felt slowwitted and wondered if she was losing her mind, a concept she had always disagreed with. How could you lose your mind? It was always there though it could be in severe disrepair.

In fancy Los Angeles hotel rooms there is always an uncomfortable number of mirrors that remind us why we are not movie stars.