Search for the Genuine, The Quotes

“Bukowski’s strength is in the sheer bulk of his contents, the virulent anecdotal sprawl, the melodic spleen without the fetor of the parlor or the classroom, as if he were writing while straddling a cement wall or sitting on a bar stool, the seat of which was made of thorns.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“As the Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz has said, “There are no truths, only stories.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“I want to send each member of Congress four books: Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Gary Snyder’s Practice of the Wild, and Peter Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America. If all the members of Congress actually read these four books the entire environmental movement could dissolve because it would no longer be needed. For the first time since we entered World War II Congress would glow with high intent and clear purpose. The restorative powers of knowledge in these books would be so instantaneous that workers could immediately begin removing the hog troughs from the House and Senate.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“Yellowstone is 95 percent wilderness. It is possible to be justly and intensely critical of what we have done to the remaining 5 percent, but other than this minuscule lump or series of lumps of land, the park is still out there, awesome and unsullied.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“would doubtlessly receive a low grade if tested on any subject other than my own imagination, though not lower than those that members of Congress would receive if given a diagnostic test on American history. (Knowledge of world history is as out of the question as simple honesty.)”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“I highly value being lost in the woods, though not overnight, and there is ample opportunity for that.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“most of us who eat lamb, chicken, pork, and beef have never known individual lambs, thrown scratch to chickens, slopped the hogs or held a piglet, or brushed down a 4-H heifer for the county fair. Meat has become a packaged abstraction at the supermarket.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“It is also true in futuristic terms that hunting will become an archaism indulged in only by the eccentric wealthy when the press of population becomes too immense on an exhausted and crowded country. This process is especially visible now in Britain, Ireland, and the rest of Europe.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“Key West, before its gradual and inevitable gentrification, was a nexus, particularly in the seventies, for crazed and random hormones, free-flowing alcohol and pharmaceuticals, the kind of behavioral skew that requires some time to effect recovery, a euphemism for cold sweat and prayer. But the fishing was wonderful.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“Practically speaking, a life that is vowed with simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actual existing world and its wholeness.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“The government offers you nothing but apprehension. Only you can offer yourself peace.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“I took off on foot, discovering again that the surest cure for mental exhaustion is physical exhaustion, though only if you keep it “light.” Dream advice must not be taken as another sodden nostrum.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“She prefers to sleep with you when you’re a river rather than a mud puddle.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“I am also at the age where I no longer care if I’m nuts.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“My memory stuns me when I think of all the “prominent” writers of the sixties, seventies, and eighties who have simply disappeared from notice, quite irrespective of where they lived or wrote, or who published them.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“The South runs to parody—heat, magnolias, racial cruelty, crude businessmen, a sexual stewpot, and, as a Chicago writer said, “Southern writers have traditionally aimed their crotchless panties at New York.” The West is mostly vacationland, faux cowboys, banal mountains, they hate outsiders, and cows are the most important citizens. The Southwest is dry heat, cactus, rattlesnakes, right-wing hideouts, border drugs, the twin Babylons of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The Northwest is the relatively simple concoction of big forests being cut for the Japanese, an oil soaked ocean, it rains every day, the culinary torpor of pen-raised salmon, Microsoft dweebs.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“I try to write well so I won’t be caught shitting out of my mouth like a politician. To”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“I excel at taking naps, pouring drinks, lighting my cigarettes, writing too many novels, and, some say, cooking.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“It only gradually occurred to me that our wounds are far less unique than our cures.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“Ultimately, the perception of reality in a culture is consensual, and so it must be if its peculiar civilization is to function”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

“And it is easy for a young poet to be obsessed with Yeats’s notion that life is a long preparation for something that never occurs.”
― Jim Harrison, Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015