Quotes from Jim Harrison

from: Age Sixty-nine) Often, lately, the night is a cold maw and stars the scattered white teeth of the gods, which spare none of us. At dawn I have birds, clearly divine messengers that I don't understand yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions.

Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass

the natural world seemed to absorb the poison in me.

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense. from The Beast God Forgot to Invent

One thing that has gone wrong in America is the general acceptance of bad ham

Some of our strangest actions are also our most deeply characteristic: secret desires remain weak fantasies unless they pervade a will strong enough to carry them out.

from: Age Sixty-nine) There is this circle I walk that I have learned to love. I hope one day to be a spiral but to the birds I'm a circle.

Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.

If you live on the railroad tracks the train's going to hit you, Grandpa used to say. -- Brown Dog

He looked around the clearing in recognition that he was lost but didn't mind because he knew he had never been found.

Perhaps when we die our names are taken from us by a divine magnet and are free to flutter here and there within the bodies of birds. I'll be a simple crow who can reach the top of Antelope Butte. (From: Hard Times)

As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done among the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny that allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work.

Beware O wanderer, the road is walking too.

I wish Barry Lopez would write novels. from Conversations with Jim Harrison

I finally understood that death and numbers don't cohere. Everyone is 'one.' An accident report might say that nine died, four of them in their teens, but each death was 'one.' Each of six million Jews was 'one.' With death it is a series of 'ones.

I don't want to get married or run away. I want my free will. I just want to love someone and not get fucked over.

In fact he was as lovesick as a high schooler of an especially sensitive sort who wonders if he dare share a poem with his beloved or whether she will laugh at him. He does read her the poem and her feminine capacity for romanticism for a moment approaches his own and they are suffused in a love trance, a state that so ineluctably peels back the senses making them fresh again whatever ages the lovers might be.

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

Cliff, a cell phone isn't a toy. It's a very lucky technical miracle for all of us. It's a prime weapon against our essential loneliness. I can't say I've ever felt that lonely.

I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, "I must do this." I can't tell the time on the tongue of the river in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment of greenery, the dust off the canyon's rock walls, the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.

We survive by learning from pain

Imagine if Congress were actually knowledgeable of American history.

another year has passed, or so they say, but calenders lie. They're a kind of cosmic business machine like their cousin clocks but break down at inappropriate times.

No one gets over anything.