The Road Home Quotes

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

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

“When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“We think of life as solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid. Old Heraclitus couldn't have stepped in the same river once, let alone twice.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“There’s really no way to minimalize your love for others and you wished terribly you could stay with them so they wouldn’t be hurt.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“Out the kitchen window, in the cool autumn breeze between where I sat and our family burial ground, I felt for an instant I could see time moving in the air. I knew I was being foolish but it struck me as odd that time never went backward except in the fragile structure of memory.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“Life is short. Why not be familiar with all of it?”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“Given intelligence, success in any area has always struck me as a matter of the level of attention, excluding the arts, of course, which seem to be involved in a mystery known only to their practitioners, if, indeed, they know themselves. You can read a Chekhov story, a Shakespeare sonnet, or listen to a Mozart sonata a dozen times and you’ll still be left twiddling your thumbs in mute admiration.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“I suppose poor Adams never recovered from the suicide of his wife, though it is arguable whether anyone ever truly recovers from anything.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“Oh Christ, will it never end, I had thought, and the transparent answer was, "No it won't," excepting in the way it ends for everyone.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“These were not Methodist Indians but warriors with a lineage that owed nothing to the white man. We did not live upon the same earth that they did and we flatter ourselves when we think we understand them. To pity these men is to pity the gods.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“We think of life as a solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“I have always collected my thoughts on Sunday, a habit enforced in my childhood when my father gave up on the church and turned to my own education with an energy that must be called unpleasant.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“There can be a wonderful substratum of thinking going on beneath the banal tonnage of human behavior. Perhaps”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“He had an elaborate, to me, theory that even the simplest of us could raise the quality of our lives by vastly increasing our level of attention.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“Maybe a single life doesn't amount to much but perhaps it should at least drift toward the common good.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home