Michael Perry Quotes & Sayings

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. — Michael Perry

Memory is a means of possession, but eventually, the greatest grace is found in letting go. — Michael Perry

Here up north we worship the sun in big gulps.
p 135 — Michael Perry

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

Over the years, I have developed a visceral reaction to families and victims expressing surprise at tragedy. Why are we surprised? Why do we forget we are mortal? Bad, bad things happen everywhere, every day. Humans, for better or worse, harbor this feeling that we - individually - are special. A patch of ice or a pea-sized blood clot makes a mockery of that illusion in a heartbeat. We are not special at all. — Michael Perry

I stand beside Tom's barn and ponder the benign heedlessness of the people in the speeding cars, and here I am in the speeding car. In my heart I wish the bypass had never been built; in my car I never take the old way. — Michael Perry

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

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

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

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. — Michael Perry

Part of the blame lies with intellectuals who are unable or unwilling to convey their ideas in terms that will play down to the cafe. But anyone who sits in that cafe and dismisses complexity by reveling in their own simplicity is no less pretentious. — Michael Perry

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. — Michael Perry

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 — Michael Perry

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. — Michael Perry

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. — Michael Perry

Sleeping in the same bed with someone to whom you can admit your failings is a lasting comfort indeed. This is not about "mea culpa" as surrender, it is about "mea culpa" as mortar in binding together the uneven bricks of a human foundation. — Michael Perry

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

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. — Michael Perry

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. — Michael Perry

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. — Michael Perry

Mom is a compulsive reader. She reads for pleasure, she reads to edify herself, but more often than not, she reads because she can't help it. I understand. The minute I find myself sitting still, I start rummaging around for printed material.
p 97 — Michael Perry

I deserve a swift kick in the shorts for all the times I've stubbornly wound my way through the library stacks, my mule head leading the way, searching fruitlessly for information a librarian could put in my hands in a matter of minutes. — Michael Perry

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 — Michael Perry

I am no sort of art expert. I have only been to the Whitney once before, on a previous business visit that coincided with the Biennial. I enjoyed great swaths of that, although I was tempted to leave a note for several of the artists that said, "Great Start!" I would write it in crayon and add a smiley face so as not to seem rude. And I just do not have the patience for video installations, having yet to encounter one that conveys the absurdity of the human situation more effectively than a night spent channel surfing in a Motel 6 on the outskirts of Rapid City. But I like to look at everything. — Michael Perry

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

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. — Michael Perry

That woman has halitosis of the soul — Michael Perry

Summer here comes on like a zaftig hippie chick, jazzed on chlorophyll and flinging fistfuls of butterflies to the sun. — Michael Perry

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. — Michael Perry

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

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. — Michael Perry

[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. — Michael Perry

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. — Michael Perry

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 — Michael Perry

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 — Michael Perry

But I hope we don't burden Amy with the idea that living outside the city limits is an inherently pious act. That rural equals righteous.
p 3 — Michael Perry

I am paddling laps in a demitasse of home-brewed ennui — Michael Perry

As usual, I overdreamed and underbudgeted. . . — Michael Perry

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. — Michael Perry

We talk about how he and Leanne are doing knowing full well there is no sufficient answer.
p 294 — Michael Perry

From the get-go, my hair was programmed to fall out. One is grateful this so rarely happens with the pancreas or the eyeballs. — Michael Perry

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. — Michael Perry

I understand that what you're doing when you call 911--it sounds so perfunctory--is announcing to strangers that you are losing the battle. I no longer have the strength, I no longer have the answers, the trouble is winning, and won't you please come help"? — Michael Perry

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

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. — Michael Perry

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

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. — Michael Perry