Top 100 Jim Harrison Quotes
#1. The head's a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don't travel at all.
Jim Harrison
#4. It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.
Jim Harrison
#5. The struggle is against a nation that will always spit in its grandchildren's faces for immediate profit. As Vizenor would say, 'Their Mother Earth is a blond.' " In
Jim Harrison
#6. That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.
Jim Harrison
#7. The days are stacked against what we think we are.
Jim Harrison
#8. However grim the world, we are what we have evolved into.
Jim Harrison
#9. Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery"
~ Snarky comment of Clive from "The River Swimmer" (pg 47)
Jim Harrison
#10. Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons of greed and my imperishable stupidity.
Jim Harrison
#11. I have closely noted that people who watch a great deal of TV never again seem able to adjust to the actual pace of life. The speed of the passing images becomes the speed the aspire to and they seem to develop an impatience and boredom with anything else.
Jim Harrison
#12. The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.
Jim Harrison
#13. We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within.
Jim Harrison
#14. We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small.
Jim Harrison
#15. The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth
Jim Harrison
#16. 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
Jim Harrison
#17. Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.
Jim Harrison
#18. I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.
Jim Harrison
#19. My heart must open to the cosmos with no langauage unless we invent it moment by moment in order to breathe.
Jim Harrison
#20. I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.
Jim Harrison
#21. The trajectory started when I was on the roof of our house looking out at a swamp when I was 19. I had written for several years, starting at about 15, but that day on the roof I took my vows and acknowledged my calling.
Jim Harrison
#22. Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.
Jim Harrison
#23. Some nights are three nights long,
some days a mere noon hour, then whistled
back to work, the heart dredging sludge.
Jim Harrison
#24. Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.
Jim Harrison
#25. Isabel saw all their lives becoming history in units of days and nights so fatally private there was no one left for her to love.
Jim Harrison
#26. I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.
Jim Harrison
#27. That is simply the most beautiful publishing office in the world, with that cranky old building in that wonderful park.
Jim Harrison
#28. I find it impossible not to believe that there's something in Irish blood that favors their power with words.
Jim Harrison
#29. I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.
Jim Harrison
#30. With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open, while our eyes are turned in ward, said
Jim Harrison
#31. When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.
Jim Harrison
#32. After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.
Jim Harrison
#33. Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.
Jim Harrison
#34. It's very difficult to look at the World
and into your heart at the same time.
In between, a life has passed.
Jim Harrison
#35. One of the curious effects of a bad hangover is that you think you're wrong whether you are or not. Not wrong in particulars, but wrong in general, wrong about everything.
Jim Harrison
#36. No one grows up, they just get tired. Or few indeed. No stopping for dead animals on the turnpike. Too dangerous.
Jim Harrison
#37. 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.
Jim Harrison
#38. Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.
Jim Harrison
#39. Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.
Jim Harrison
#40. The wilderness does not make you forget your normal life so much as it removes the distractions for proper remembering.
Jim Harrison
#41. In Ecuador the Indian mate was too poor to buy Polaroid glasses but he saw the caudal fins of marlin long before my perfect eyes noticed anything. Benny played pool as if the cue stick emerged from his body. Not my alcohol & geometry. She was an asshole and I couldn't have loved her at gunpoint.
Jim Harrison
#42. Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.
Jim Harrison
#43. No one else can hold your hand or take this voyage of the soul for you.
Jim Harrison
#44. He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line "The land was ours before we were the land's." What a scandal that would be, America's best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.
Jim Harrison
#45. I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.
Jim Harrison
#46. I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.
Jim Harrison
#47. Goddamn but her mind was so exhausted with trying to hold the world together, tired of being the living glue for herself, as if she let go, great pieces of her life would shatter and fall off in mockery of the apocalypse.
Jim Harrison
#48. New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York - in case you haven't noticed.
Jim Harrison
#49. I don't want to get married or run away. I want my free will. I just want to love someone and not get fucked over.
Jim Harrison
#50. I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
Jim Harrison
#52. Deadly Sins on a long, yellow legal tablet: Pride, Greed, Envy, Lechery, Gluttony, Anger, Laziness.
Jim Harrison
#54. I was on the verge of jumping into one of those holes in life out of which we emerge a bit tattered and bloody, though we remain sure nonetheless that we had to make the jump.
Jim Harrison
#55. To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.
Jim Harrison
#56. The natural world seemed to absorb the poison in me.
Jim Harrison
#57. I suppose poor Adams never recovered from the suicide of his wife, though it is arguable whether anyone ever truly recovers from anything.
Jim Harrison
#58. Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.
Jim Harrison
#59. Cliff, 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.
I can't say I've ever felt that lonely.
Jim Harrison
#60. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can't stop it.
Jim Harrison
#61. You don't have to become what you already are, which is a relief.
Jim Harrison
#62. Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot.
Jim Harrison
#64. The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.
Jim Harrison
#66. Now that she's at one with herself and the world she can work my brain over with high horsepower energy.
Jim Harrison
#67. I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.
Jim Harrison
#68. Imagine if Congress were actually knowledgeable of American history.
Jim Harrison
#69. Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.
True North
Jim Harrison
#70. (from: Age Sixty-nine)
Often, lately, the night is a cold maw
and stars the scattered white teeth of the gods, which spare none of us. At dawn I have birds, clearly divine messengers that I don't understand
yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions.
Jim Harrison
#71. Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.
Jim Harrison
#72. If you added it up, without her there was nothing
but with her even the simplest of gestures of walking a bird dog in the desert, or selecting the ingredients for a meal for two rather than one took on an ineffable charm.
(from the novella, Revenge)
Jim Harrison
#73. There are no true monsters, only some people [ ... ] who with regularity acted like a monster. It's still episodic. [ ... ] It never works when you leave out even a small part of the picture.
Jim Harrison
#74. One thing that has gone wrong in America is the general acceptance of bad ham
Jim Harrison
#75. Shakespeare and a very few others qualified but thousands and thousands of others dropped into the void without a sound.
Jim Harrison
#76. I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.
Jim Harrison
#77. I couldn't run a tight schedule, and if you're any good at teaching, you get sucked dry because you like your students and you're trying to help them, but you don't have any time left to write yourself.
Jim Harrison
#78. Sitting there on the deck during intermittent periods of dozing I thought that it's really hard on a soul to admit how much of life we have spent being full of shit.
Jim Harrison
#79. My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.
Jim Harrison
#80. Children, those lucky ones to whom clocks are of no consequence but who drift along on the true emotional content of time.
Jim Harrison
#81. I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.
Jim Harrison
#82. Nothing on my trip thus far was as I expected which shows you that rather than simply read about the United States you have to log the journey.
Jim Harrison
#83. I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.
Jim Harrison
#84. Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
Jim Harrison
#85. The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.
Jim Harrison
#86. I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.
Jim Harrison
#87. I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.
Jim Harrison
#89. I was a dog on a short chain / and now there's no chain.
Jim Harrison
#90. Fishing makes us less the hostages to the horrors of making a living.
Jim Harrison
#91. (from: Age Sixty-nine)
There is this circle I walk
that I have learned to love.
I hope one day to be a spiral
but to the birds I'm a circle.
Jim Harrison
#92. Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.
Jim Harrison
#93. How could this nasty twerp be so ferally sexual dressed nearly as a boy?
Jim Harrison
#94. I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony.
Jim Harrison
#95. Death steals everything except our stories.
Jim Harrison
#97. The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.
Jim Harrison
#99. A poet must discover that it's his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.
Jim Harrison
#100. Wherever we go we do harm, forgiving
ourselves as wheels do cement for wearing
each other out. We set this house
on fire, forgetting that we live within.
(from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)
Jim Harrison
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