Legends of the Fall Quotes

“If you added it up, without her there was nothing--but with her even the simplest of gestures of walking a bird dog in the desert, or selecting the ingredients for a meal for two rather than one took on an ineffable charm.

(from the novella, Revenge)”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else.

(from the novella, The Man Who Gave Up His Name)”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“Isabel saw all their lives becoming history in units of days and nights so fatally private there was no one left for her to love.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“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

“Some of our strangest actions are also our most deeply characteristic: secret desires remain weak fantasies unless they pervade a will strong enough to carry them out.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“He looked around the clearing in recognition that he was lost but didn’t mind because he knew he had never been found.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“In fact he was as
lovesick as a high schooler of an especially sensitive sort who wonders if he dare share a poem with his
beloved or whether she will laugh at him. He does read her the poem and her feminine capacity for
romanticism for a moment approaches his own and they are suffused in a love trance, a state that so
ineluctably peels back the senses making them fresh again whatever ages the lovers might be.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“Perhaps swimming was dancing in the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and bluegills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“Някои хора чуват вътрешните си гласове с голяма яснота и се научават да живеят с това, което са чули. Такива хора полудяват или се превръщат в легенда.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“Tristan stood there dazed in the rain and mud with his friend embracing him in sorrow. The scout who was from their tent approached with an officer in tail. They raced to the paddock and quickly saddled three horses. The officer commanded them to stop and they knocked him aside in full gallop northward toward Calais reaching the forest by midnight. They sat still and fireless through the night and then at dawn in the fine sifting snow they crept forward in the snow and wiped it from the faces of the dozen or so dead until Tristan found Samuel, kissed him and bathed his icy face with his own tears: Samuel’s face gray and unmarked but his belly rended from its cage of ribs. Tristan detached the heart with a skinning knife and they rode back to camp where Noel melted down candles and they encased Samuel’s heart in paraffin in a small ammunition canister for burial back in Montana.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“The heart wants life so much and the brain is shocked at the approach of death. The soldier always thinks it will be someone else, the man before or behind him, or hopefully no one he knows will ever die.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“After dinner the Texan invited Cochran to accompany him to a whorehouse but he declined saying he'd feed, walk and water the horse.
'Strikes me you had a big day and some poontang might ease your mind.'
'Nope. Killed a man I hated today and I don't want to mix my pleasures. I want to lay in bed and think how good it felt.'
The Texan nodded and lit a cigar. He was no man's fool.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“I followed all the rules - man's and God's. And you... followed none of them and they all loved you more”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“Everyone wishes a measure of mystery in their life that they have done nothing in particular to deserve.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“He picked up Samuel's saddle as if he were picking up doom herself, doom always owning the furthest, darkest reaches of the feminine gender. Pandora, Medusa, the Bacchantes, the Furies, are female though small goddesses beyond sexual notions. Who reasons death anymore than they can weigh the earth or the heart of beauty?”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naive. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Percé children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents. Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time insisted we had won. We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren’t exempt: note Jesus’s howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And we can’t seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“As a Harvard boy he also owned the aura of fungoid self-congratulation that Nordstrom identified with Ivy League types. Back in Los Angeles he had noted that graduates of Yale and Dartmouth and so on had automatic purchase even though they were swine, fools or plain stupid as was often the case, looking as they did at the rest of the country with careless indulgence as if it were an imposition on their lives.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“He gave up quickly trying to attune the experience to a language construct, as if life were an especially filthy mirror and speechless love cleansed this mirror and made life not only bearable but something lived with eagerness, energy, an expectancy whose pleasure didn’t depend on fatality.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“language was a convenience of the heart, not something to bludgeon people with.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishment on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naïve. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Perce children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents. Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time had insisted that we had won. We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private matter dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren’t exempt: note Jesus’s howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And we can’t seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“He kissed her legs until neither of them wore anything. And the hawk now perched in a tree in the woodlot could see an imprecise circle of flattened green wheat and two bodies entwined until late in the afternoon when it began to rain again. The man tried to cover the girl with the coat but she stood up, did a dance and drank more wine. Such simple events last lovers a long time. Scarcely anyone can turn their backs on the best thing that has happened to them. So she went to California for the summer and he retrieved her for the last year of school in the fall after a hundred letters both ways.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“Ludlow stayed in his room and would not see his eldest son. He sent Pet down into the parlor carrying his slate saying he could not talk to Alfred as long as he represented the U.S. government and its base practices.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“Against the popular misconception, cowboys never did own ranches. They were not much more than the expert, wandering hippies of their day, cossacks of the range who knew animals much better than each other.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“There is an impulse for vengeance among certain men south of the border that leaves even the sturdiest Sicilian gasping for fresh air.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“his”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“aperçus”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“No one has figured out how accidental is the marriage of blasphemy and fate.”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall