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181 " Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain. "
― Jim Harrison , True North
182 " Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. "
183 " I admired the way she was staying a single step in front of her madness in the way that so many of us do by merely watching the clock where each tick brings us safely over the lip of the future, our madness a split second behind us. "
― Jim Harrison , In Search of Small Gods
184 " Sitting there on the deck during intermittent periods of dozing I thought that it’s really hard on a soul to admit how much of life we have spent being full of shit. "
― Jim Harrison , The Beast God Forgot to Invent
185 " From a distance the head is a bowling ball on the shoulders, but not so: a carapace and inside, the contents are what children call "gushy." The soft brain has its own improbable life containing galaxies, tens of thousands of people met, the microcosm of life in one place and on the diaphanous and often filthy cloth of memory, hanging there and battered on the clothesline in so many years of bad weather, wet and stiff with ice or blasted by sun and heat, part of it in shreds. (From the poem, 'Round') "
― Jim Harrison , Dead Man's Float
186 " By early February my world had considerably lightened because I spent all day "seeing" rather than reading or thinking, the latter of which comprised mostly of shortsighted rehearsals of questionable conclusions. This all could easily be allowed to dissipate into the landscape because I was exhausted by the fraudulence of my hard work. "
187 " There are no true monsters, only some people [...] who with regularity acted like a monster. It's still episodic. [...] It never works when you leave out even a small part of the picture. "
― Jim Harrison
188 " Naturally, both sides of the family seemed utterly normal to me at the time but a great deal less so in retrospect. "
― Jim Harrison , Off to the Side: A Memoir
189 " In 1958 a friend in San Francisco burned out his veins shooting up hot paregoric, a cheap high. It’s safer for me to continue smoldering just below the temperature of actual flame wondering if there’s a distant land where life freely flows like a river. Years ago in a high green pasture near timberline I watched a small black bear on its back rolling back and forth and shimmying to scratch its back, pawing the air with pleasure, not likely wanting to be anywhere or anyone else. "
190 " Lift up your dark heart and sing a song abouthow time drifts past you like the gentlest, almostimperceptible breeze.— Jim Harrison, from “Cold Poem,” Saving Daylight. (Copper Canyon Press 2006) "
― Jim Harrison , Saving Daylight
191 " Ludlow stayed in his room and would not see his eldest son. He sent Pet down into the parlor carrying his slate saying he could not talk to Alfred as long as he represented the U.S. government and its base practices. "
― Jim Harrison , Legends of the Fall
192 " It occurred to me that dancing for Cynthia was the same as the pleasure I took in manual labor or fishing. Maybe everyone was better off in a state of physical exhaustion. "
193 " The struggle is against a nation that will always spit in its grandchildren's faces for immediate profit. As Vizenor would say, ‘Their Mother Earth is a blond.’ “ In "
― Jim Harrison , Just Before Dark
194 " 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. "
195 " Dad said I would always be “high minded and low waged” from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right. "
― Jim Harrison , The English Major
196 " You live in a beautiful place and you don’t act like you know it. "
197 " Maybe a single life doesn't amount to much but perhaps it should at least drift toward the common good. "
― Jim Harrison , The Road Home
198 " I have such trouble, getting all these manuscripts every year by the hundreds, and galleys and so on, because you can tell right away if a person’s not in touch; if they want sincerity, or to be right, it’s hopeless. If there isn’t a primary intoxication with language and playfulness of their own consciousness, it’s hopeless. If they just want to be right, well then they’d be better off being a professor, wouldn’t they? "
199 " He had an elaborate, to me, theory that even the simplest of us could raise the quality of our lives by vastly increasing our level of attention. "
200 " Built into both Calvinism and Catholicism is the implicit threat that anything truly wonderful should also make you feel guilty, especially the skin we were all born in. "