Michael Perry > Quotes

“Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Playboy combined.”
― Michael Perry

“As usual, I overdreamed and underbudgeted. . . ”
― Michael Perry

“Memory is a means of possession, but eventually, the greatest grace is found in letting go. _Population: 485_, p 178.”
― Michael Perry

“The sky is deep black, the stars pressing down brilliantly all around, and I am reminded that we are not beneath the constellations, but among them.

p 127”
― Michael Perry

“[Fire] is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo.”
― Michael Perry, Population: 485

“We sort the past in an attempt to sort the present and anticipate the future.”
― Michael Perry, Truck: A Love Story

“Part of the blame lies with intellectuals who are unable or unwilling to convey their ideas in terms that will play down to the cafe. But anyone who sits in that cafe and dismisses complexity by reveling in their own simplicity is no less pretentious.”
― Michael Perry

“Her eyes are wide and steady beneath the brim of her floppy cap. How far out of infancy do we lose this gaze, with its utter absence of expectation or prejudice? What is it like to simply see what is before you, without the skew of context?

p 342”
― Michael Perry

“We plunge into love with a naivete that ignores all prior humiliations. Thank goodness, I guess. Because we never learn, we reach for love again and again.”
― Michael Perry

“The amateur study of philosophy is like taking a few laps with a NASCAR driver. You’re not qualified to do it on your own, you have no business behind the wheel, but for a few laps or paragraphs, you’re right in there with ‘em, and when it’s all over, you’ve learned something. Or, as my local fire chief once said, you’ve simply exasperated the situation.”
― Michael Perry

“It is the blessing of dumb work done close to the earth-one gritty minute at a time, we move forward.”
― Michael Perry

“Inevitably, our children come to see us as we are. Not as we wish we were, or even as we should be.”
― Michael Perry, Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace

“I will never cut it as a Quaker - I cannot find it in me to renounce all violence, not with two daughters under my protection - but I do love their silent hour, which in my case invariably evolved into a self-scouring meditation on the idea that the busy life is not the full life.”
― Michael Perry, Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg

“It isn't just the idea of a woman in a truck. At this point, they're everywhere. The statisticians tell us today's woman is as likely to buy a truck as a minivan. One cheers the suffrage, but the effect is dilutive. My head doesn't snap around the way it used to. Ignoring for the moment that my head (or the gray hairs upon it) may be the problem, I think it's not about women in trucks, it's about certain women in certain trucks. Not so long ago I was fueling my lame tan sedan at the Gas-N-Go when a woman roared across the lot in a dusty pickup and pulled up to park by the yellow cage in which they lock up the LP bottles. She dismounted wearing scuffed boots and dirty jeans and a T-shirt that was overwashed and faded, and at the very sight of her I made an involuntary noise that went, approximately, ohf...! I suppose ohf...! reflects as poorly on my character as wolf whistle, but I swear it escaped without premeditation. Strictly a spinal reflex. [...] The woman plucking her eyebrows in the vanity mirror of her waxed F-150 Lariat does not elicit the reflex. Even less so if her payload includes soccer gear or nothing at all. That woman at the Gas-N-Go? I checked the back of her truck. Hay bales and a coon dog crate. Ohf...!”
― Michael Perry

“If you had gone around the table last night ticking off the Ten Commandments and asking for a show of hands to indicate transgression, you would have thought we were doing the wave. A gloss of the New Testament rules and you would have heard the rotator cuffs snapping. But if you had asked a simpler question -- "Who among you is proud of this?" -- I think you would have seen no hands, and this is what I love about that crew. Chipped and profane, they have taught me that there is a certain vocabulary you learn only through attrition and heartache.”
― Michael Perry

“I am content in bachelor life, but at moments like this, I admit to old-fashioned sexist longing. Sometimes I cook up comfort food, but cooking your own comfort food is akin to scratching your own back. Same sensation, less watts.”
― Michael Perry

“Mom is a compulsive reader. She reads for pleasure, she reads to edify herself, but more often than not, she reads because she can't help it. I understand. The minute I find myself sitting still, I start rummaging around for printed material.

p 97”
― Michael Perry

“The pesto and angel hair are warm in the bowl on my lap, the fragrances of olive oil and basil blending the exotic and familiar, equal parts sunny Tuscan hillside and hometown dirt. A meal like this makes you want to live forever, if only for the scent of warm pesto in January.”
― Michael Perry

“But I hope we don't burden Amy with the idea that living outside the city limits is an inherently pious act. That rural equals righteous.

p 3”
― Michael Perry

“Alice once told me artistry does not reside in motivation but rather stems from showing up, with the intent to be honest. When I meet a dreamer with calluses I try to shut up and listen.”
― Michael Perry, Truck: A Love Story

“You take one last look and think it would have been something to climb that silo and peek out the window before the interstate plowed through. To see the land unbroken. You are compelled, of course, to consider how the Ojibwe felt, returning to the campsites at Cotter Creek one day only to hear the sound of sawing and the lowing of oxen. Life will circle around on you. Also visible from the silo window is a gigantic billboard pointed at the interstate and advertising a casino owned by the Ojibwe. The billboard says, WINNERS, 24/7.”
― Michael Perry

“From the get-go, my hair was programmed to fall out. One is grateful this so rarely happens with the pancreas or the eyeballs.”
― Michael Perry

“We were the church. As the New Testament instructed. When it was time for Sunday morning meeting, we convened in private homes. To raise a structure and call it a church was the worldly way. A church made of hands was soon cluttered with altars and crucifixes, and was thereupon idolatrous. These false churches, they were not walking in Truth. They were whistling off to Hades. This was a shame, because I knew some real nice Lutherans.”
― Michael Perry, Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg

“It’s hard to talk about guns without sounding defensive or blustery. I’m pro-gun the same way I’m pro-potato fork. I use them both to gather food for the year, with the caveat that if you break into my house, I won’t be waiting for yo at the top of the stairs with a potato fork.”
― Michael Perry

“I stand beside Tom's barn and ponder the benign heedlessness of the people in the speeding cars, and here I am in the speeding car. In my heart I wish the bypass had never been built; in my car I never take the old way.”
― Michael Perry, Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace

“In 1951, a man bought a pickup truck because he needed to load things up and move them. Things like bricks and bags of feed. Somewhere along the line trendsetters and marketers got involved, and now we buy pickups -- big, horse-powered, overbuilt, wide-assed, comfortable pickups -- so that we may stick our key in the ignition of an icon, fire up an image, and drive off in a cloud of connotations. I have no room to talk. I long to get my International running part so I can drive down roads that no longer exist.”
― Michael Perry

“...here up north we worship the sun in big gulps.

p 135”
― Michael Perry

“... Tom got to rattling off the pranks he and his school boy buddies pulled ... and what I saw wasn't an old man gone wistful but rather an old man still resonating to the glee of a young heart.”
― Michael Perry, Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace

“Humans possess no monopoly on the powers of preservation and destruction. Our ability to wield these powers with sustained intent, however, is unmatched on this earth. Nature can trump us in an instance or over millenia, but in the day-to-day main, humankind has developed a preponderant ability to fiddle with destiny. More than any other natural force or creature, we decide what will go and what will stay: the rainforest, an old building, a sickly cat... ourselves.”
― Michael Perry

“The tough times start," he said, "the day the last casserole dish is returned.”
― Michael Perry