Jim Harrison Quotes
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
Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.
The wilderness does not make you forget your normal life so much as it removes the distractions for proper remembering.
The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.
Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.
I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.
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.
There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.
Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
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.
Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.
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.
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.
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.
You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it.
The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That's why I ran to the woods.
I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance.
Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.
A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.
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.
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)
Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.
Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot.
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.
It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.
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.
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.
That is simply the most beautiful publishing office in the world, with that cranky old building in that wonderful park.
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.
Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.
