Sam Harris > Sam's Quotes

“I fear that my lesson in this lifetime is humility... and I think that lesson is beneath me.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“I was the muddled concoction of my father’s contradictions. The same man who warned me that “life is a bowl-a shit” was the channel to my bliss. The infection and the cure. He was, at once, the drought that left me parched and gasping, and the rain that nurtured the single blade of grass, pushing itself up from between the jagged cracks in the sidewalk, and into the sun.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“Word was that God could heal anyone. The wounded, the infirm, even lepers. I figured I should be a breeze.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“You’re not from around here, are you?” asked the room service girl.
“No,” I replied. “That’s why I’m staying at a hotel . . .”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“I wanted to be famous. So famous that I would be vehemently hated by all the people I admired most.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“His broomish mustache hung over most of his mouth and was always littered with remnants of his last meal. Not crumbs. Enough to qualify as leftovers.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“I was 15 years old and singing “I Miss the Hungry Years.” And I was a little fat.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“The closest thing in my life to a mistake of that magnitude was the marriage of my dear friend Liza to the Man Whose Name Shall Go Unmentioned.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“My four-year-old son and I have little in common. Cooper loves cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time. I hate cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“Keeping my weight in constant check had resulted in choosing alcohol as my primary means of caloric intake.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“I’d decreased my sit-up regime and had taken to drawing on abdominal muscles with brown eye shadow.”
― Sam Harris

“I got a P-touch labeler and labeled everything: places for diapers, bibs, onesies, pants, socks, crib sheets, binkies, pack ’n’ play sheets, baby wipes, changing table covers . . . Everything has a place, and that place was going to have a goddamn label on it.”
― Sam Harris

“There was no gasping last breath or final, wisdom-filled declaration. No fluttering of the eyelids or clawed outstretch of hand. No moan or even the raising of his chest for a last, releasing exhalation. He just . . . died.”
― Sam Harris

“For the first time in my life, I wanted to smell like someone’s smoke. It was Aretha smoke. I decided right then that I would not shower before the show, or perhaps ever again. I’d been anointed.”
― Sam Harris

“It was finally the obese, inescapable burden of sadness—such a simple word—that finally led to acknowledging and treating my alcoholism.”
― Sam Harris

“Occasionally, Michael Jackson would titter to himself at an internal joke and raise his shoulders like a five-year-old girl who’d just said the word “penis” for the first time.”
― Sam Harris

“I feel happier when I feel thinner and I am much more pleasant to be around.”
― Sam Harris

“I asked God for greater challenges to endure. I should have been more specific.”
― Sam Harris

“Somewhere along the way, I discovered and returned to myself, concurrently. It was as consuming as a storm in the way it drenched me. It was as unpredictable as tears in the way it surprised me. And it was as sturdy as courage, in the way said yes.”
― Sam Harris

“Elizabeth Taylor was wearing an ensemble that made me think she’d looked in her closet that morning and said, “What shall I wear? . . . Everything!”
― Sam Harris

“A heavy, peppery steam spiraled skyward and the remains of our house spit and stammered like the last stubborn kernels of popping corn. Everyone was so sorry.”
― Sam Harris

“She kept a picture of a very Caucasian Jesus on her living room wall and her gallstones in a baby food jar that hung from a pink ribbon on the bathroom doorframe.”
― Sam Harris

“I have always believed that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an illusion; the illusion is the tunnel itself.”
― Sam Harris

“He told me about the 1960s experimental theater movement in New York, describing a particularly fabulous production in someone’s West Village loft apartment in which the first act was a man carrying around a bag of dirt and carefully sprinkling it all over the furniture, and the second act was the same guy vacuuming it up.”
― Sam Harris

“I wanted mobs of fans to remind me that I was not alone in the way I felt about myself.”
― Sam Harris

“I remembered the motto of a good friend: “When a limo pulls up— get in.”
― Sam Harris

“What could be better than Sun-In, a spray-on hair lightening product that could give me a natural, summer-streaked appearance, and at under three dollars!?”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“Jerry was a massive, lumbering, redheaded, freckled bully whose head was vastly disproportionately larger than the rest of his body. Like one of those effigies people burn at political rallies.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“The sum of the past days fell upon me and the soft rumble of the engine invited sleep, but I willed myself to stay awake. It wasn’t every day I was on Oprah’s private jet.”
― Sam Harris, Ham: Slices of a Life: Essays and Stories

“89. That’s why I’d come, I supposed. For the injustice.”
― Sam Harris