In Search of Small Gods Quotes

“Death steals everything except our stories.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don't know what.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“My heart must open to the cosmos with no langauage unless we invent it moment by moment in order to breathe.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“(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.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass,”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“(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.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“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)”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“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.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“. . . 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.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“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

“You don't have to become what you already are, which is a relief.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“In 20,000 walks you're bound to learn a little.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“The memory
is the not-quite-living museum of our lives.
Sometimes its doors are insufferably wide open
with black stars in a grey sky, and horses
clattering in and out, our dead animals resting here
and there but often willing to come to life again
to greet us, parents and brothers and sisters sit
at the August table laughing while they eat twelve
fresh vegetables from the garden. Rivers, creeks, lakes
over which birds funnel like massive schools of minnows.
In memory the clocks have drowned themselves, leaving
time to the life spans of trees. The world of our lives
comes unbidden as night.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons of greed and my imperishable stupidity.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“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.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“Of late I feel a cold blue wind through my life and need to go backwards myself to the outback I once knew so well where there were too many mosquitoes, blackflies, curious bears, flowering berry trees of sugar plum and chokeberry, and where sodden and hot with salty sweat I'd slide into a cold river and drift along until I floated against a warm sandbar, thinking of driving again the gravel backroads of America at thirty-five miles per hour in order to see the ditches and gulleys, the birds in the fields, the mountains and rivers, the skies that hold our 10,000 generations of mothers in the clouds waiting for us to fall back into their arms again.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“The fatherless son had two new moons in his forty days in the wilderness, the second one telling him it was time to become God and enter the beast of history.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“Back when I was young and still alive there were almost too many gods. You could see them ripple in the water before the lake's ice melted in April, the loons and curlews giving them voice.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“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