276 Quotes by Jim Harrison

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

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.

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.

Christ rose so long ago but the airhe rose through hasn't forgottenthe slight red contrail from the wounds.

It's up to poets to revive the gods.

Pain (2)...You want to give up, throw in the towel but youcan't give up because you're all you have.

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.

For years now I've found the Earth haunted. Azoological beasts rage in untraceable configurations. They're called governments. Wounds made that never heal on every acre and covered with the scar tissue of our living existence. The argument at bedrock: I don't want to live on Earth but I don't want to die.

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.