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101 " There is nothing so immediately rewarded in American life, in the arts or anything else, as a shrill and limited consciousness. "
― Jim Harrison , Just Before Dark
102 " I need the solidity of a whole book because life often doesn't cohere for me, I mean my perception of life, and I need to find some bedrock however temporary. It's like books help me glue the parts of my life together into an acceptable whole. "
― Jim Harrison , The Summer He Didn't Die
103 " There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything. I sat down on the ground to avoid tipping over from the enormity of it all. "
― Jim Harrison , Dalva
104 " 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. "
― Jim Harrison , A Good Day to Die
105 " 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. "
― Jim Harrison , The Ancient Minstrel
106 " 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. "
― Jim Harrison , Legends of the Fall
107 " Animals spend a lot of time being still so when we do they lose their logical mistrust of us. "
― Jim Harrison , Returning to Earth
108 " I hadn't noticed the green of summer enough and now the colors were gray and white and black. "
109 " Pain (2)...You want to give up, throw in the towel but youcan't give up because you're all you have. "
― Jim Harrison , Dead Man's Float
110 " Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road-- Only wakes upon the sea. "
― Jim Harrison , In Search of Small Gods
111 " 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. "
112 " I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony. … A lot of good fiction is sentimental. … The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. … I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass. "
― Jim Harrison
113 " 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. "
114 " In 20,000 walks you're bound to learn a little. "
115 " 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. "
― Jim Harrison , The Woman Lit by Fireflies
116 " 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. "
― Jim Harrison , The Road Home
117 " Everyone wishes a measure of mystery in their life that they have done nothing in particular to deserve. "
118 " There is a spine of goofiness in America that has never been deterred by literacy "
119 " 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. "
― Jim Harrison , The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
120 " Deadly Sins on a long, yellow legal tablet: Pride, Greed, Envy, Lechery, Gluttony, Anger, Laziness. "
― Jim Harrison , The Big Seven