Kate > Kate's Quotes

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.”
― Jim Harrison, Wolf False Memoir

“Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about. -- True North”
― Jim Harrison

“The days are stacked against what we think we are.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“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

“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

“Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.”
― Jim Harrison

“This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.”
― Jim Harrison, The English Major

“We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within. ”
― Jim Harrison, Saving Daylight

“I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.”
― Jim Harrison

“A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.”
― Jim Harrison

“The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.”
― Jim Harrison, Off to the Side: A Memoir

“It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“If you live on the railroad tracks the train's going to hit you, Grandpa used to say. -- Brown Dog”
― Jim Harrison

“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend. ”
― Jim Harrison

“The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.
”
― Jim Harrison

“Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.”
― Jim Harrison, Warlock

“Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.”
― Jim Harrison

“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.”
― Jim Harrison

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire