Quotes from Jim Harrison

No one has figured out how accidental is the marriage of blasphemy and fate.

How could this nasty twerp be so ferally sexual dressed nearly as a boy?

It seems that so much of good luck and bad are accidental and that the chance meetings that Pasternak had been criticized for in Zhivago are in fact the core of life.

I never met a normal person and neither have you.

his theory that all of the world's problems were caused by notions of ethnic virtue and that if marriages were limited to interracial lovers there would be peace on earth. There

He waved before she could respond, turning and walking out the door where a guard waited. In her throat a sob married a scream and became nothing.

No one grows up, they just get tired. Or few indeed. No stopping for dead animals on the turnpike. Too dangerous.

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

people largely envied people who lived a simple life, not that they couldn't do so themselves. It is actually easy when people aren't fond of clutter. You strip the life down to the bare boards underneath, the barest elements of shelter and food

I just now know that you can only meet a man at the level of his intentions.

Try as you might there's nothing you can do about bird shadows except try to head them off and abruptly stop, letting them pass by in peace. Looking up and down at the very same moment is difficult for a single-eyed man. The ones coming behind you, often cautious crows or ravens, strike hard against the back and nape nerve. Like most of life your wariness is useless. You wobble slightly dumbstruck, queasy, then watch the shadow flit across the brown wind-tormented grass.

She sounded untypically merry on the phone, enjoying the rare whorish feeling she was sure would pass.

That's money, folks, the perverse love thereof, as if we swam carrying an anchor or the blinders my grandpa's horses wore so that while ploughing they wouldn't notice anything but the furrow ahead, not certainly the infinitely circular horizon of earth.

Work could be anything that aroused your curiosity: the natural world, music, anthropology, the stars, or even sewing or gardening. When we were little girls we would invent dresses the Queen of Egypt might wear, or have a special garden where we ordered seeds for vegetables or flowers we had never heard of.

He's quite a thinker. I stood up and started to take off my clothes. He got down on the floor. We really went to town all evening and I sent him home before midnight.

Now there's a specific banality to rage as a reaction, an unearned sense of cleansing virtue.

If you dive down deep enough there are no words to bring you up. Not my problem. If you fly too high there are no words to help you land. I went back to my land of bears and learned to bob like an apple on the river's surface.

I saw a doe and a fawn but Sonia chased them away, roaring as if they meant us harm. I rehearsed my entire life and I heard my heart for the first time. In the morning I had fantasies of love and laughter, even creating the image of Duane and my father riding horseback up the drawn toward me.

Paul was a strong person in every respect and it made us all feel much better that he was there.

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. One

I must have awakened and fallen back to sleep a hundred times that night, listening to the wind rattle the palm fronds, the party noise of people jumping in the pool, the slurred shouts that the humidity and walls softened until all the words and dreams in the world became round.

A sonic boom crushes a baby mink's skull. We know that. Isn't it enough?

It was a strange drive, a sense that you could see the June heat lifting off the earth, the greenness darkening as the twilight waned. Far off the west there were thunderheads that caught the sun we could no longer see and made the air yellowish. We took a gravel road norh that dead-ended at the Niobrara River, the wind around the speeding car too loud for talk.

There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything.