Jim Harrison quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jim Harrison on Wise Famous Quotes.

It takes a long time for a father to drive the love out of a child.

Some nights are three nights long,
some days a mere noon hour, then whistled
back to work, the heart dredging sludge.

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

I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance.

Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.

Imagine if Congress were actually knowledgeable of American history.

You don't have to become what you already are, which is a relief.

I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.

We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within.

How could all this happen when there was an ocean?

I wish Barry Lopez would write novels.
from Conversations with Jim Harrison

Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.

It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.

Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice.

If you live on the railroad tracks the train's going to hit you, Grandpa used to say.
Brown Dog

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

Death steals everything except our stories.

I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.

Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.

I was a dog on a short chain / and now there's no chain.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

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.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.

Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot.

Shakespeare and a very few others qualified but thousands and thousands of others dropped into the void without a sound.

What cannot be said, will get wept.

No one gets over anything.

You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can't stop it.

I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.

One thing that has gone wrong in America is the general acceptance of bad ham

I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.

Fishing makes us less the hostages to the horrors of making a living.

The wilderness does not make you forget your normal life so much as it removes the distractions for proper remembering.

The idea is to eat well and not die from it - for the simple reason that that would be the end of my eating.

Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.

New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York - in case you haven't noticed.

My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.

I suppose poor Adams never recovered from the suicide of his wife, though it is arguable whether anyone ever truly recovers from anything.

I do have trouble with titles.

Zen is the vehicle of reality.

How much l wanted to take scalps, but it was not my kill. - Legends of the Fall

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

The world gave one so many reasons to be pissed off at it.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

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.

I prefer the skyline
of a shelf of books.

Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, Que pasa, baby?

Children, those lucky ones to whom clocks are of no consequence but who drift along on the true emotional content of time.

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.

Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone
rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.

I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don't know what.

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.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.

A poet must discover that it's his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.

How could this nasty twerp be so ferally sexual dressed nearly as a boy?

Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.

Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

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.

My heart must open to the cosmos with no langauage unless we invent it moment by moment in order to breathe.

Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls ...

Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.

That is simply the most beautiful publishing office in the world, with that cranky old building in that wonderful park.

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.

The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.

In 20,000 walks you're bound to learn a little.

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.

With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open, while our eyes are turned in ward, said

I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.

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.

Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.
True North

He had been foolish enough to believe that as he recovered over the past few months the world might be recovering with him

The head's a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don't travel at all.

That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.

I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony.

It's very difficult to look at the World
and into your heart at the same time.
In between, a life has passed.

When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought

No one grows up, they just get tired. Or few indeed. No stopping for dead animals on the turnpike. Too dangerous.

After the passing of irresistible music you must make do with a dripping faucet.

No one else can hold your hand or take this voyage of the soul for you.

We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small.

Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.

I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.

I find it impossible not to believe that there's something in Irish blood that favors their power with words.

How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.

I seek the substantial in life.

He waved before she could respond, turning and walking out the door where a guard waited. In her throat a sob married a scream and became nothing.

Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass,