Quotes from Jim Harrison

Against the popular misconception, cowboys never did own ranches. They were not much more than the expert, wandering hippies of their day, cossacks of the range who knew animals much better than each other.

Flesh is a reasonably good fertilizer, or even better, predator food. A family of coyotes would live off the carcass for a few days. Then the grass and ferns would grow up through the skeleton until the porcupines had gnawed it away for its salt content.

I was cooking my life in a cracked clay pot that was leaking. I had found secrets I didn't deserve to know. When the battle for the mind is finally over it's late June, green and raining.

She is also the least defenseless woman I have ever known.

Oh sons and daughters of man, under the vast and starry night though the stars are invisible, what are you doing here while your histories moment by moment trail off behind you like auto exhaust

A creek is more powerful than despair.

now that she's at one with herself and the world she can work my brain over with high horsepower energy.

A few weeks ago, passing through my grocer's, I bought a packet of dehydrated French's pork gravy. The label noted that this gravy was award-winning. Since I have never won an award, who am I to question this gravy?

Birthdays are [soul chasers,] ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask [the usual question[, "Qué pasa, baby?" (The Raw and the Cooked)

We think of life as a solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid.

At heart he was a secret Quaker and football was pure violence. The coach was always telling him to "hit them harder." The coach wanted him to put opposing players "out of commission." He kept it to himself but wondered what the point of the "game" was if your intention was to hurt people badly.

Birthdays are [soul chasers,] ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask [the usual question], "Qué pasa, baby?

How much l wanted to take scalps, but it was not my kill. - Legends of the Fall

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.

A black hole the size of 300 billion stars is gobbling up the M87 galaxy because astronomers gave it a boring name.

The woods can be a bit strange. It takes a long time to feel you belong there and then you never again really belong in town. It's a choice made for you by your brain at a moment you don't notice.

It was usually not the big things that destroyed marriages but the day-to-day treating each other poorly.

The feathers on your chin mean that you ate the parakeet.

I did it with two big ole girls over in Munising once but I didn't write home about it. One of them fell down in the motel shower and we had a deuce of a time getting her out until I turned on the cold water to sober her up.

Elaborate is the courtliness of the imagination, on one sore knee before beauty.

I found a stock tank and let the horse drink, then tethered it and lifted the dog over the edge and watched it swim in happy circles. I got pretty wet lifting the dog out of the tank but didn't care -- there is something about doing a favor for a dog that calms you down.

By not letting places be themselves we show our contempt for them. We bury them in sentiment, then suffocate them to death in one way or another. I can ruin both the desert and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by carrying to them an insufferable load of distinctions that disallows actually seeing the flora and fauna or the paintings. Children are usually better at finding mushrooms and arrowheads because they are either ignorant of or unwilling to carry the load.

Driving out of the woods I felt a new and curious calm but doubted that it would last: I had changed my life so often that I finally decided there'd never been anything to change—I could make all the moves I wished to on the surface as if I were playing Chinese checkers but these moves were suspended on a thin layer that failed to stir anything below.

With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open, while our eyes are turned in ward," said