Best 88 quotes of Jim Harrison on MyQuotes

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.

Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.

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.

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.

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.

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

The wife picked out ceramic tile for floor covering, not realizing that cost was determined by square foot, not square yard like carpet. Thinking the price was plenty reasonable, she had an extra room of tile ordered for installation. When the bill arrived, it was staggering. She and her husband began a fight that continued all through the construction job. They ended up divorced, but not until she had broken every window.

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

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

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

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

We Are All One. When we allow ourselves to become aware of this statement in its purest form, we open the doors to reveal the oneness of being. Using the process of conscious evolution we begin to recognise our true underlying identity, for once we have glimpsed the existence of this realm, we then begin to reveal what it is . . . . our true natural state.

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.

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)

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

Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.

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

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

Zen is the vehicle of reality.

Christ rose so long ago but the air he rose through hasn't forgotten the slight red contrail from the wounds.

For years now I've found the Earth haunted. Azoological beasts rage in untraceable configurations. They're called governments. Wounds made that never heal on every acre and covered with the scar tissue of our living existence. The argument at bedrock: I don't want to live on Earth but I don't want to die.

He did recall that the summer after graduating from college before he joined the state police he had read Shakespeare. It was the pure language that stupefied him. He would be in a diner reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and his acquaintances were confident he was studying for some test. The test turned out to be the nature of his mind. Shakespeare seemed even truer than history. Literature was against the abyss while history wallowed in it.

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)

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

It's up to poets to revive the gods.

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

Never before have the American people had their noses so deeply in one another's business. If I announce that I and eleven other diners shared a thirty-seven-course lunch that likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon, Those of a critical nature will let their minds run in tiny, aghast circles of condemnation. My response to them is that none of us twelve disciples of gourmandise wanted a new Volvo. We wanted only lunch and since lunch lasted approximately eleven hours we saved money by not having to buy diner. The defense rests.

Pain (2) ...You want to give up, throw in the towel but you can't give up because you're all you have.

She wasn't trying to overcome life, only to get along with it, to blend with the processes she could scarcely understand in a world that had permitted her no solid ground.

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