Top 100 Jim Harrison Quotes
#1. From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences.
Greta Salpeter
#2. Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker. His books
C.J. Box
#3. Ten Little Indians once again shows [Alexie] to be not just one of the West's best, but one of the most brilliantly literate American writers, even funnier than Louise Erdrich, even more primal than Jim Harrison, and even more eloquent than Annie Proulx.
Ron Franscell
#4. I wish Barry Lopez would write novels.
from Conversations with Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison
#5. The head's a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don't travel at all.
Jim Harrison
#6. It takes a long time for a father to drive the love out of a child.
Jim Harrison
#8. I remember my grandfather telling me how each of us must live with a
full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy
ourselves with our passion to escape the aloneness.
Jim Harrison
#10. I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
Jim Harrison
#11. In 20,000 walks you're bound to learn a little.
Jim Harrison
#12. It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.
Jim Harrison
#13. It seemed altogether right to him that they would drive through the small village of Paradise. It would be hard to find someone less demanding of life than Brown Dog and his current position was beyond his most strenuous ambitions.
Jim Harrison
#14. 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
#15. That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.
Jim Harrison
#16. The days are stacked against what we think we are.
Jim Harrison
#17. I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don't know what.
Jim Harrison
#18. However grim the world, we are what we have evolved into.
Jim Harrison
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. How could all this happen when there was an ocean?
Jim Harrison
#22. 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
#23. Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass,
Jim Harrison
#24. The idea is to eat well and not die from it - for the simple reason that that would be the end of my eating.
Jim Harrison
#25. his theory that all of the world's problems were caused by notions of ethnic virtue and that if marriages were limited to interracial lovers there would be peace on earth. There
Jim Harrison
#26. The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.
Jim Harrison
#27. We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within.
Jim Harrison
#28. When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought
Jim Harrison
#29. I was feeling right at home all by myself. The woods can be a bit strange. It takes a long time to feel you belong there and then you never again really belong in town. It's a choice made for you by your brain at a moment you don't notice.
Jim Harrison
#30. He had been foolish enough to believe that as he recovered over the past few months the world might be recovering with him
Jim Harrison
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.
Jim Harrison
#35. I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.
Jim Harrison
#36. My heart must open to the cosmos with no langauage unless we invent it moment by moment in order to breathe.
Jim Harrison
#37. So when I made some money, I didn't have any idea how one handled such a situation because no one in our family ever had any money.
Jim Harrison
#38. Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.
Jim Harrison
#39. I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.
Jim Harrison
#40. I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.
Jim Harrison
#41. I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.
Jim Harrison
#42. 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
#43. If you live on the railroad tracks the train's going to hit you, Grandpa used to say.
Brown Dog
Jim Harrison
#44. I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too.
Jim Harrison
#45. Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.
Jim Harrison
#46. Some nights are three nights long,
some days a mere noon hour, then whistled
back to work, the heart dredging sludge.
Jim Harrison
#47. Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.
Jim Harrison
#48. Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.
Jim Harrison
#49. The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.
Jim Harrison
#50. 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
#51. I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.
Jim Harrison
#52. That is simply the most beautiful publishing office in the world, with that cranky old building in that wonderful park.
Jim Harrison
#53. I find it impossible not to believe that there's something in Irish blood that favors their power with words.
Jim Harrison
#54. I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.
Jim Harrison
#55. With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open, while our eyes are turned in ward, said
Jim Harrison
#56. He looked around the clearing in recognition that he was lost but didn't mind because he knew he had never been found.
Jim Harrison
#57. 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
#58. At heart he was a secret Quaker and football was pure violence. The coach was always telling him to "hit them harder." The coach wanted him to put opposing players "out of commission." He kept it to himself but wondered what the point of the "game" was if your intention was to hurt people badly.
Jim Harrison
#59. 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
#60. Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.
Jim Harrison
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. No one grows up, they just get tired. Or few indeed. No stopping for dead animals on the turnpike. Too dangerous.
Jim Harrison
#65. 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
#66. [ ... ] I finally understood that death and numbers don't cohere. Everyone is 'one.' An accident report might say that nine died, four of them in their teens, but each death was 'one.' Each of six million Jews was 'one.' With death it is a series of 'ones.
Jim Harrison
#67. Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.
Jim Harrison
#68. Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.
Jim Harrison
#69. The wilderness does not make you forget your normal life so much as it removes the distractions for proper remembering.
Jim Harrison
#70. 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
#71. How much l wanted to take scalps, but it was not my kill. - Legends of the Fall
Jim Harrison
#72. Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.
Jim Harrison
#73. How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.
Jim Harrison
#74. Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls ...
Jim Harrison
#75. All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.
Jim Harrison
#76. After the passing of irresistible music you must make do with a dripping faucet.
Jim Harrison
#77. No one else can hold your hand or take this voyage of the soul for you.
Jim Harrison
#78. 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
#79. I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.
Jim Harrison
#80. I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.
Jim Harrison
#81. 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
#82. Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy ... or they become legend.
Jim Harrison
#83. Nothing so much torments a geezer as the thought of the unlived life.
Jim Harrison
#84. Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.
Jim Harrison
#85. New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York - in case you haven't noticed.
Jim Harrison
#86. 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
#87. I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
Jim Harrison
#89. Deadly Sins on a long, yellow legal tablet: Pride, Greed, Envy, Lechery, Gluttony, Anger, Laziness.
Jim Harrison
#91. 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
#92. Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.
Jim Harrison
#93. 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
#94. The natural world seemed to absorb the poison in me.
Jim Harrison
#95. 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
#96. Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.
Jim Harrison
#97. 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
#98. Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.
Jim Harrison
#99. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can't stop it.
Jim Harrison
#100. Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, Que pasa, baby?
Jim Harrison
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