Jim Harrison Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

Even now, far up in the wilderness in my cabin, where I just shot a lamprey passing upstream with my Magnum, I wouldn't have the heart to turn down a platter of hot buttered cheerleaders.

Jim Harrison
If you've known a lot of actresses and models you return to waitresses because at least they smell like food.

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

Jim Harrison
I have been eating so much garlic that last night I thought my flatulence might propel me off the bed onto the hard floor where an injury was certainly possible.

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

Jim Harrison
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
And what a dance you had kicking your legs from
the rope — We all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota
halfway down the river.
Beauty takes my courage
away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter's red
robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.

Jim Harrison
The idea is to eat well and not die from it — for the simple reason that that would be the end of your eating.

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

Jim Harrison
I feel my failure intensely
as if it were a vital organ
the gods grew from the side of my head.
You can't cover it with a hat and I no longer
can sleep on that side it's so tender.
I wasn't quite faithful enough
to carry this sort of weight up the mountain.

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

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

Jim Harrison
The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That's why I ran to the woods.

Jim Harrison