Jim Harrison Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.

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

Jim Harrison
My work piles up,
I falter with disease.
Time rushes toward me —
it has no brakes. Still,
the radishes are good this year.
Run them through butter,
add a little salt.

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

Jim Harrison
Greed is killing the soul-life of the nation. You can see it all around you. It's destroying what's left of our physical beauty, it's polluting the country, it's making us more Germanic and warlike and stupid.

Jim Harrison
The reason I have my cabin is that it's easier to suffocate now in this culture than it's ever been, in terms of sheer, continuous bombardment, and you're not supposed to suffocate if you're an artist.

Jim Harrison
Attentiveness is your main tool in life, and in fiction, or else you're going to be boring.

Jim Harrison
The idea of getting bad reviews is not nearly as bad as getting no reviews, frankly.

Jim Harrison
In terms of classic Freudianism, if you have a knot in your past that stops the flow of your life, it's a psychic impediment. Your memories enlarge in ways proportionally to how willing you are to allow them to enlarge.

Jim Harrison
Sometimes I wish I could forget more things. I have to make a conscious effort to free my mind, open it again, because memory can be tremendously rapacious.

Jim Harrison
As Rimbaud said, which I believed very much when I was nineteen and which now I've come back to, for our purposes as artists, everything we are taught is false—everything.

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Harrison
It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn't keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it's standing thigh deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of life. You easily recognize this mortality and it dissipates into the landscape.

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

Jim Harrison
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
I'm always having a man in desperate straits trying to help somebody else out with no apparent success, because nobody can be helped by anybody.

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Harrison