Michael Perry Quotes

It (a singer's voice) sounds as if it was aged in a whiskey cask, cured in an Ozarks smokehouse, dropped down a stone well, pulled out damp, and kept moist in the palm of a wicked woman's hand.

You take one last look and think it would have been something to climb that silo and peek out the window before the interstate plowed through. To see the land unbroken. You are compelled, of course, to consider how the Ojibwe felt, returning to the campsites at Cotter Creek one day only to hear the sound of sawing and the lowing of oxen. Life will circle around on you. Also visible from the silo window is a gigantic billboard pointed at the interstate and advertising a casino owned by the Ojibwe. The billboard says, WINNERS, 24/7.

In specific moments of ground-level clarity, I recognize the dumbing down of the nation for what it is: an act of charity committed specifically for knotheads like me.

The tough times start," he said, "the day the last casserole dish is returned.

Alice once told me artistry does not reside in motivation but rather stems from showing up, with the intent to be honest. When I meet a dreamer with calluses I try to shut up and listen.

I got religion in the third grade, and jeepers, did I need it. The devil was in me, and Hardy Biesterveld wasn't helping.

There commenced an epic snit.

It isn't just the idea of a woman in a truck. At this point, they're everywhere. The statisticians tell us today's woman is as likely to buy a truck as a minivan. One cheers the suffrage, but the effect is dilutive. My head doesn't snap around the way it used to. Ignoring for the moment that my head (or the gray hairs upon it) may be the problem, I think it's not about women in trucks, it's about certain women in certain trucks. Not so long ago I was fueling my lame tan sedan at the Gas-N-Go when a woman roared across the lot in a dusty pickup and pulled up to park by the yellow cage in which they lock up the LP bottles. She dismounted wearing scuffed boots and dirty jeans and a T-shirt that was overwashed and faded, and at the very sight of her I made an involuntary noise that went, approximately, ohf...! I suppose ohf...! reflects as poorly on my character as wolf whistle, but I swear it escaped without premeditation. Strictly a spinal reflex. [...] The woman plucking her eyebrows in the vanity mirror of her waxed F-150 Lariat does not elicit the reflex. Even less so if her payload includes soccer gear or nothing at all. That woman at the Gas-N-Go? I checked the back of her truck. Hay bales and a coon dog crate. Ohf...!

Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Playboy combined.

In 1951, a man bought a pickup truck because he needed to load things up and move them. Things like bricks and bags of feed. Somewhere along the line trendsetters and marketers got involved, and now we buy pickups
big, horse-powered, overbuilt, wide-assed, comfortable pickups
so that we may stick our key in the ignition of an icon, fire up an image, and drive off in a cloud of connotations. I have no room to talk. I long to get my International running part so I can drive down roads that no longer exist.

Imagine the wizened quality of a life blanched of contradiction and double standard.
p 44

But the sky ... cumulonimbus clouds are stacked and banked to the stratosphere, and the lowering sun has bronzed and brassed and blushed them. these are clouds to make you long for wings. These are clouds that leave you not knowing what to believe. - - - Population 485 - Meeting your Neighbors One Siren at a Time

Even as a guy with pickup truck sensibilities, I have always gone a little in the liver for patchouli.

Memory is a means of possession, but eventually, the greatest grace is found in letting go. _Population: 485_, p 178.

It is the blessing of dumb work done close to the earth-one gritty minute at a time, we move forward.

Grievance is a sullen little boat, blown in the creepy breeze of ridiculous sighs.

Her eyes are wide and steady beneath the brim of her floppy cap. How far out of infancy do we lose this gaze, with its utter absence of expectation or prejudice? What is it like to simply see what is before you, without the skew of context?
p 342

If you had gone around the table last night ticking off the Ten Commandments and asking for a show of hands to indicate transgression, you would have thought we were doing the wave. A gloss of the New Testament rules and you would have heard the rotator cuffs snapping. But if you had asked a simpler question
"Who among you is proud of this?"
I think you would have seen no hands, and this is what I love about that crew. Chipped and profane, they have taught me that there is a certain vocabulary you learn only through attrition and heartache.

Tom got to rattling off the pranks he and his school boy buddies pulled ... and what I saw wasn't an old man gone wistful but rather an old man still resonating to the glee of a young heart.

Cynicism is overrated, and far too easy. In small doses, cynicism
like irony
provides an essential tempering quality. But to wallow in it, and to dismiss things like hope and faith, is cowardly and unoriginal.

The amateur study of philosophy is like taking a few laps with a NASCAR driver. You're not qualified to do it on your own, you have no business behind the wheel, but for a few laps or paragraphs, you're right in there with 'em, and when it's all over, you've learned something. Or, as my local fire chief once said, you've simply exasperated the situation.

The pesto and angel hair are warm in the bowl on my lap, the fragrances of olive oil and basil blending the exotic and familiar, equal parts sunny Tuscan hillside and hometown dirt. A meal like this makes you want to live forever, if only for the scent of warm pesto in January.

I will never cut it as a Quaker - I cannot find it in me to renounce all violence, not with two daughters under my protection - but I do love their silent hour, which in my case invariably evolved into a self-scouring meditation on the idea that the busy life is not the full life.

Just as with your women, you attempt to render existence in terms of perfection," said Billy. "Life is a rough approximation of things hoped for. You need to revel in the misfires. In the scars and dings. You need to develop a taste for regret. It's the malt vinegar of emotions-drink it straight from the bottle and it'll eat yer guts. Add a sprinkle here and there and it puts a living edge on things.

We sort the past in an attempt to sort the present and anticipate the future.

I am content in bachelor life, but at moments like this, I admit to old-fashioned sexist longing. Sometimes I cook up comfort food, but cooking your own comfort food is akin to scratching your own back. Same sensation, less watts.

I am a stranger in a strange town, and the man standing beside me has just removed his pants. There are mitigating factors - he is well-kempt, we are in a laundromat, and as a registered nurse, I have seen this sort of thing before - but they fail to completely dissipate the tension inherent in sharing close quarters with a pantless stranger.

We were the church. As the New Testament instructed. When it was time for Sunday morning meeting, we convened in private homes. To raise a structure and call it a church was the worldly way. A church made of hands was soon cluttered with altars and crucifixes, and was thereupon idolatrous. These false churches, they were not walking in Truth. They were whistling off to Hades. This was a shame, because I knew some real nice Lutherans.

As usual, I overdreamed and underbudgeted. . .

We spend this life looking for a center, a place where we can suspend without a wobble. The specific coordinates are elusive, scalable only by the heart. _Population: 485_, p 202

The sky is deep black, the stars pressing down brilliantly all around, and I am reminded that we are not beneath the constellations, but among them.
p 127

We plunge into love with a naivete that ignores all prior humiliations. Thank goodness, I guess. Because we never learn, we reach for love again and again.

Humans possess no monopoly on the powers of preservation and destruction. Our ability to wield these powers with sustained intent, however, is unmatched on this earth. Nature can trump us in an instance or over millenia, but in the day-to-day main, humankind has developed a preponderant ability to fiddle with destiny. More than any other natural force or creature, we decide what will go and what will stay: the rainforest, an old building, a sickly cat ... ourselves.

[Fire] is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo.

It's hard to talk about guns without sounding defensive or blustery. I'm pro-gun the same way I'm pro-potato fork. I use them both to gather food for the year, with the caveat that if you break into my house, I won't be waiting for yo at the top of the stairs with a potato fork.

Inevitably, our children come to see us as we are. Not as we wish we were, or even as we should be.