Top 120 Jim Harrison Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.”

— Jim Harrison

2. “Barring love I’ll take my life in large doses alone – rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.”

— Jim Harrison

3. “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.”

— Jim Harrison

4. “We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within.”

— Jim Harrison

5. “Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.”

— Jim Harrison

6. “No one else can hold your hand or take this voyage of the soul for you.”

— Jim Harrison

7. “Death steals everything except our stories.”

— Jim Harrison

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

8. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

10. “How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.”

— Jim Harrison

11. “Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road – Only wakes upon the sea.”

— Jim Harrison

12. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”

— Jim Harrison

13. “The days are stacked against what we think we are.”

— Jim Harrison

14. “Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about. – True North.”

— Jim Harrison

15. “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

16. “Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

18. “I seek the substantial in life.”

— Jim Harrison

19. “The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.”

— Jim Harrison

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

20. “I’m hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don’t know what.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

23. “He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” What a scandal that would be, America’s best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.”

— Jim Harrison

24. “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.”

— Jim Harrison

25. “Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

27. “I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony.”

— Jim Harrison

28. “I can write anywhere.”

— Jim Harrison

29. “I write novellas because I don’t like loose sprawling prose.”

— Jim Harrison

30. “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

31. “Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.”

— Jim Harrison

32. “Fishing makes us less the hostages to the horrors of making a living.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

34. “Dad said I would always be “high minded and low waged” from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.”

— Jim Harrison

Featured in: Reading Quotes

35. “I don’t see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.”

— Jim Harrison

36. “You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it.”

— Jim Harrison

37. “Birds are poems I haven’t caught yet.”

— Jim Harrison

38. “I was feeling right at home all by myself. The woods can be a bit strange. It takes a long time to feel you belong there and then you never again really belong in town. It’s a choice made for you by your brain at a moment you don’t notice.”

— Jim Harrison

39. “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

40. “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

41. “What cannot be said, will get wept.”

— Jim Harrison

42. “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.”

— Jim Harrison

43. “Michigan is two radically different places – the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.”

— Jim Harrison

44. “After the passing of irresistible music you must make do with a dripping faucet.”

— Jim Harrison

45. “Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.”

— Jim Harrison

46. “I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.”

— Jim Harrison

47. “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.”

— Jim Harrison

48. “The head’s a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don’t travel at all.”

— Jim Harrison

49. “Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls...”

— Jim Harrison

50. “You can have a pretty good first line but not a strong enough thought to tag along more lines and sometimes in the middle words become bored and make war on one another. Notebooks are full of these fragments, shrapnel of our intention. Life is short on conclusions and that’s why it’s often a struggle to end a poem.”

— Jim Harrison