Jim Harrison > Quotes

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony.”
― Jim Harrison

“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

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... 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

“Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, "Que pasa, baby?”
― Jim Harrison

“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”
― Jim Harrison, The Beast God Forgot to Invent

“Death steals everything except our stories.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.”
― Jim Harrison, After Ikkyu & Other Poems

“Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.”
― Jim Harrison, Warlock

“Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.”
― Jim Harrison, Wolf False Memoir

“Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.”
― Jim Harrison

“My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.”
― Jim Harrison, Songs of Unreason

“Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.”
― Jim Harrison, The English Major

“The days are stacked against what we think we are.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don't know what.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“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

“The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.”
― Jim Harrison, Off to the Side: A Memoir

“Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about. -- True North”
― Jim Harrison

“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

“The Statue of Liberty, that frequently malevolent bitch, has an enormous tumor in her gut that has spread to her brain and eyes. With regard to the Native Americans she has Alzheimer's or mad cow disease and can't remember her past, and her blind eyes can't see the terrifying plight of most of the Indian tribes. Meanwhile she blows China and stomps Cuba to death, choosing to forget the Native cultures she has already destroyed.”
― Jim Harrison, On the Trail to Wounded Knee: The Big Foot Memorial Ride

“It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home

“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, After Ikkyu & Other Poems

“The world that used to nurse us
now keeps shouting inane instructions.
That's why I ran to the woods.”
― Jim Harrison, Songs of Unreason

“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, Legends of the Fall

“We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within. ”
― Jim Harrison, Saving Daylight

“His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else.

(from the novella, The Man Who Gave Up His Name)”
― Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

“I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.”
― Jim Harrison, Julip

“Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.”
― Jim Harrison

“Everyday I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.”
― Jim Harrison

“How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.”
― Jim Harrison, The River Swimmer: Novellas

“When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought”
― Jim Harrison, The Road Home