Diet for Madness

I mentioned Jim Harrison as my favorite writer the other day. Wes commented that he'd never heard of him; maybe that describes you as well. I read Harrison with a pen in hand. Here are words or phrases I've underlined in my current read - The Road Home. I don't know that I'm encouraging you to read Harrison, for the practice can lead to a kind of madness; it makes you uncomfortable with television and politics and people who believe talking is thinking. But it's a relatively free country, so go for it if you choose.

...but then we are in deepest error when we think our children are truly our own.

How irreparably changed the world becomes when the loves of one's life are dead. It is always the last day of Indian summer. We are caught out in the cold and there's no door to get back in.

My father often railed against "common sense" which he viewed as most often an essentially petty mixture of greed and self-interest, the inanity of the "Onward, Christian Soldiers" attitude that propelled millions of nitwits westward, utterly destroying much of the earth and all of the Native cultures.

I suspect the wild calls the loudest when it has largely disappeared from our lives...

A Spanish poet, whose name I don't recall, wrote that we leave small pieces of our hearts here and there until there is not enough left to give away and stay alive.

I had begun to think it was central to my character and number of years to ache.

To the white people, 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.

...it is arguable whether anyone ever truly recovers from anything.

The stars are the most soothing objects for the claustrophobe.

It takes a great deal of strength to keep January out of the soul...

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.

With age I need not make judgments about their comparative merits, having lost the impulse to be right.