"Short things are short all over and long things are long all over"
About this Quote
Jim Harrison’s line reads like a backwoods proverb that refuses to behave like one. “Short things are short all over and long things are long all over” is comically obvious, the kind of statement you could toss off while sharpening a knife or pouring a drink. That’s the point: Harrison uses the tautology as a blade. By sounding dumb, it gets to say something sharp.
The intent is to attack our favorite loophole, the belief that problems can be localized, compartmentalized, handled “over here” while the rest of life stays clean. Harrison’s subtext is that scale is holistic: if something is small, it’s small everywhere; if it’s sprawling, it sprawls everywhere. It’s a diagnosis of habits and hungers. A “short” temperament doesn’t magically become expansive when pressure hits. A “long” grief doesn’t stay politely in the corner of the room. The phrasing makes it feel physical, like length in the body, not just in the mind.
Context matters because Harrison’s work is full of appetites, landscapes, and consequences - drinking, sex, solitude, the brutality and beauty of the natural world. He’s suspicious of tidy self-improvement narratives and of the cultured notion that we can edit ourselves without paying full freight. The line works because it’s blunt enough to be funny, and true enough to be unsettling: you don’t get to outsource magnitude. Whatever you are dealing with, you are dealing with all of it.
The intent is to attack our favorite loophole, the belief that problems can be localized, compartmentalized, handled “over here” while the rest of life stays clean. Harrison’s subtext is that scale is holistic: if something is small, it’s small everywhere; if it’s sprawling, it sprawls everywhere. It’s a diagnosis of habits and hungers. A “short” temperament doesn’t magically become expansive when pressure hits. A “long” grief doesn’t stay politely in the corner of the room. The phrasing makes it feel physical, like length in the body, not just in the mind.
Context matters because Harrison’s work is full of appetites, landscapes, and consequences - drinking, sex, solitude, the brutality and beauty of the natural world. He’s suspicious of tidy self-improvement narratives and of the cultured notion that we can edit ourselves without paying full freight. The line works because it’s blunt enough to be funny, and true enough to be unsettling: you don’t get to outsource magnitude. Whatever you are dealing with, you are dealing with all of it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Puns & Wordplay |
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