The English Major

by Jim Harrison

Dad said I would always be “high minded and low waged” from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.

Forty-five years of sex fantasies come true and I’m thinking that I wish I could go fishing.

I’m sort of neutral in terms of religion but ever since I was a kid I’ve thought moving water to be the best thing God made.

It’s impossible to watch a swallow fly and not want to be one at least for a while.

I had a craving for books that I hadn’t had in thirty years when I still believed that books might save my life. That was before I quit teaching and had decided that if I read one more book such as Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, my head would blow apart like John Kennedy’s.

We English majors of a serious bent are susceptible to high ideals we paste on our lives like decals.

“I have no more time for self-doubt which is a profession in itself for English majors.