Quotes from Jim Harrison

In Ecuador the Indian mate was too poor to buy Polaroid glasses but he saw the caudal fins of marlin long before my perfect eyes noticed anything. Benny played pool as if the cue stick emerged from his body. Not my alcohol & geometry. She was an asshole and I couldn't have loved her at gunpoint.

She wasn't trying to overcome life, only to get along with it, to blend with the processes she could scarcely understand in a world that had permitted her no solid ground.

He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line "The land was ours before we were the land's." What a scandal that would be, America's best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.

The heart wants life so much and the brain is shocked at the approach of death. The soldier always thinks it will be someone else, the man before or behind him, or hopefully no one he knows will ever die.

Animals spend a lot of time being still so when we do they lose their logical mistrust of us.

I hadn't noticed the green of summer enough and now the colors were gray and white and black.

You don't have to become what you already are, which is a relief.

After dinner the Texan invited Cochran to accompany him to a whorehouse but he declined saying he'd feed, walk and water the horse. 'Strikes me you had a big day and some poontang might ease your mind.' 'Nope. Killed a man I hated today and I don't want to mix my pleasures. I want to lay in bed and think how good it felt.' The Texan nodded and lit a cigar. He was no man's fool.

I prefer the skyline of a shelf of books.

I bought a ticket with the last of my money at the bus station, telling the agent that there certainly seemed to be a long, long road winding to the land of my dreams.

Nothing on my trip thus far was as I expected which shows you that rather than simply read about the United States you have to log the journey.

In 20,000 walks you're bound to learn a little.

A movement in the vines startled her and an opossum scurried out, looked at Clare and flopped over in fake death. She had seen this twice before in her garden back home and it was difficult not to draw certain parallels, amusing ones, though if you played dead long enough the act of coming back to life was questionable.

What is it the wind has lost that she keeps looking for under each leaf?

We think of life as solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid. Old Heraclitus couldn't have stepped in the same river once, let alone twice.

There is a spine of goofiness in America that has never been deterred by literacy

The present passes too quickly to notice and I've never had a grip on the future, even as an idea.

I followed all the rules - man's and God's. And you... followed none of them and they all loved you more

Much earlier in this century an Austrian journalist, Karl Kraus, pointed out that if you actually perceived the true reality behind the news you would run, screaming, into the streets. I have run screaming into the streets dozens of times but have always managed to return home in time for dinner-and usually an hour early so that I can help in the preparation.

Young people seem not to know that they are going to get old, but older people know that they are not going to become young again.

Deadly Sins on a long, yellow legal tablet: Pride, Greed, Envy, Lechery, Gluttony, Anger, Laziness.

He picked up Samuel's saddle as if he were picking up doom herself, doom always owning the furthest, darkest reaches of the feminine gender. Pandora, Medusa, the Bacchantes, the Furies, are female though small goddesses beyond sexual notions. Who reasons death anymore than they can weigh the earth or the heart of beauty?

I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don't know what: not the usual undiscovered bird in the cold snowy willows, garishly green and yellow What could it be, this astonishment, but falling into a liquid mirror to finally understand that the purpose of earth is earth? It's plain as night. She's willing to sleep with us a little while.

After the passing of irresistible music you must make do with a dripping faucet.