Top 36 Michael Perry Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. It is the blessing of dumb work done close to the earth-one gritty minute at a time, we move forward.
Michael Perry
#4. I am paddling laps in a demitasse of home-brewed ennui
Michael Perry
#5. Here up north we worship the sun in big gulps.
p 135
Michael Perry
#6. Summer here comes on like a zaftig hippie chick, jazzed on chlorophyll and flinging fistfuls of butterflies to the sun.
Michael Perry
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Playboy combined.
Michael Perry
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. The tough times start," he said, "the day the last casserole dish is returned.
Michael Perry
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Even as a guy with pickup truck sensibilities, I have always gone a little in the liver for patchouli.
Michael Perry
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. As usual, I overdreamed and underbudgeted. . .
Michael Perry
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Memory is a means of possession, but eventually, the greatest grace is found in letting go.
Michael Perry
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. We sort the past in an attempt to sort the present and anticipate the future.
Michael Perry
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. We talk about how he and Leanne are doing knowing full well there is no sufficient answer.
p 294
Michael Perry
#32. 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
#33. Imagine the wizened quality of a life blanched of contradiction and double standard.
p 44
Michael Perry
#34. 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
#35. Inevitably, our children come to see us as we are. Not as we wish we were, or even as we should be.
Michael Perry
#36. Grievance is a sullen little boat, blown in the creepy breeze of ridiculous sighs.
Michael Perry
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