"untrammeled renegade genius”
Called "an untrammeled renegade genius,” an "American literary icon,” and “a force of nature;” Harrison brought his deep poetic sense to a plethora of novels. An advocate for the benefits of a rural lifestyle, he lived most of his life on a farm in Michigan near where he was born. Most well known for his novels and screenplays like Legend of the Fall, much closer to his heart was his 12+ collections of poetry. Said to have looked like a brick layer, a beer salesman, or a sumo wrestler; he continued the Lao Tzuian, small-is-beautiful lineage of Han Shan, Henry David Thoreau, Willa Cather, and E. F. Schumacher. The superficial details of his life belie the depth of his experience, insight, and wisdom.
Lineages
American (USA) Apostles of Doubt Poets
After Ikkyu & Other Poems
Beast God Forgot to Invent
Dead Man's Float
English Major
In Search of Small Gods
Legends of the Fall
Paris Review, 1988
Road Home
The Road Home
Warlock
“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.”
from The Road Home
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“Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.”
from After Ikkyu & Other Poems
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“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.”
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“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”
from Beast God Forgot to Invent
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“Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.”
from Warlock
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“Sometimes I wish I could forget more things. I have to make a conscious effort to free my mind, open it again, because memory can be tremendously rapacious.”
from Paris Review, 1988
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“All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.”
from Road Home
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“Rumi advised me to keep my spirit up in the branches of a tree and not peek out too far, so I keep mine in the very tall willows along the irrigation ditch out back.”
from Dead Man's Float
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“Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.”
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“A cell phone isn't a toy. It's a very lucky technical miracle for all of us. It's a prime weapon against our essential loneliness but I can't say I've ever felt that lonely.”
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“Everyday I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.”
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“If you live on the railroad tracks the train's going to hit you.”
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“Dad said I would always be 'high minded and low waged' from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.”
from English Major
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“Everything we are taught is false—everything.”
from Paris Review, 1988
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“I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don't know what.”
from In Search of Small Gods
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“If you have a knot in your past that stops the flow of your life, it’s a psychic impediment. Your memories enlarge in ways proportionally to how willing you are to allow them to enlarge.”
from Paris Review, 1988
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“Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government… 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 was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits.”
from Legends of the Fall
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“In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations.”
from Paris Review, 1988
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