Quotes from Jim Harrison

In my own lifetime I've seen the apotheosis of greed as a virtue, and brutal insensitivity become enlightened self interest. We may do as well as all but a few countries but that scarcely makes us a Christian nation except to those who bathe in patriotic gore out of habit and stupidity. Neither the emperor and consorts nor the citizenry is wearing the sacramental clothing it chooses to think it is wearing. A simple, private reading of the Gospels would tell them so.

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.

Back when I was young and still alive there were almost too many gods. You could see them ripple in the water before the lake's ice melted in April, the loons and curlews giving them voice.

His wife held him and they sat there an hour vomiting up their souls, saying everything that was possible to say about their multiple faults that had kept them apart. Finally they made love to the obnoxious music of mosquitoes on the wooden floor of the porch.

However grim the world, we are what we have evolved into.

A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven't quite found the words.

Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there's no chain.

Why shouldn't this happen? I have to rid myself of this last land mine, the unlived life.

I admired the way she was staying a single step in front of her madness in the way that so many of us do by merely watching the clock where each tick brings us safely over the lip of the future, our madness a split second behind us.

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.

By early February my world had considerably lightened because I spent all day seeing rather than reading or thinking, the latter of which comprised mostly of shortsighted rehearsals of questionable conclusions. This all could easily be allowed to dissipate into the landscape because I was exhausted by the fraudulence of my hard work.

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.

Naturally, both sides of the family seemed utterly normal to me at the time but a great deal less so in retrospect.

Ludlow stayed in his room and would not see his eldest son. He sent Pet down into the parlor carrying his slate saying he could not talk to Alfred as long as he represented the U.S. government and its base practices.

Out the kitchen window, in the cool autumn breeze between where I sat and our family burial ground, I felt for an instant I could see time moving in the air. I knew I was being foolish but it struck me as odd that time never went backward except in the fragile structure of memory.

It occurred to me that dancing for Cynthia was the same as the pleasure I took in manual labor or fishing. Maybe everyone was better off in a state of physical exhaustion.

The struggle is against a nation that will always spit in its grandchildren's faces for immediate profit. As Vizenor would say, 'Their Mother Earth is a blond.' " In

He did recall that the summer after graduating from college before he joined the state police he had read Shakespeare. It was the pure language that stupefied him. He would be in a diner reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and his acquaintances were confident he was studying for some test. The test turned out to be the nature of his mind. Shakespeare seemed even truer than history. Literature was against the abyss while history wallowed in it.

Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.

Maybe a single life doesn't amount to much but perhaps it should at least drift toward the common good.

I have such trouble, getting all these manuscripts every year by the hundreds, and galleys and so on, because you can tell right away if a person's not in touch; if they want sincerity, or to be right, it's hopeless. If there isn't a primary intoxication with language and playfulness of their own consciousness, it's hopeless. If they just want to be right, well then they'd be better off being a professor, wouldn't they?

He had an elaborate, to me, theory that even the simplest of us could raise the quality of our lives by vastly increasing our level of attention.

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.

Built into both Calvinism and Catholicism is the implicit threat that anything truly wonderful should also make you feel guilty, especially the skin we were all born in.