Top 120 Jim Harrison Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I hadn’t noticed the green of summer enough and now the colors were gray and white and black.”

— Jim Harrison

52. “I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.”

— Jim Harrison

53. “That’s my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.”

— Jim Harrison

54. “Everyone wishes a measure of mystery in their life that they have done nothing in particular to deserve.”

— Jim Harrison

55. “Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.”

— Jim Harrison

56. “I’ve been lucky to spend a life pretty close to the earth up here in the north. I learned in those three days that the earth is so much more than I ever thought it was. It was a gift indeed to see all sides of everything at once. This makes it real hard to say good-bye. My family will be with me just like that old raven falling slowly down through the tree.”

— Jim Harrison

57. “Success and money can really be quite blinding.”

— Jim Harrison

58. “I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.”

— Jim Harrison

59. “One thing that has gone wrong in America is the general acceptance of bad ham.”

— Jim Harrison

60. “I’ve never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.”

— Jim Harrison

61. “A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.”

— Jim Harrison

62. “The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.”

— Jim Harrison

63. “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

64. “Deadly Sins on a long, yellow legal tablet: Pride, Greed, Envy, Lechery, Gluttony, Anger, Laziness.”

— Jim Harrison

65. “Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.”

— Jim Harrison

66. “In 20,000 walks you’re bound to learn a little.”

— Jim Harrison

67. “Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn’t comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.”

— Jim Harrison

68. “To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.”

— Jim Harrison

69. “It’s up to poets to revive the gods.”

— Jim Harrison

70. “Goddamn but her mind was so exhausted with trying to hold the world together, tired of being the living glue for herself, as if she let go, great pieces of her life would shatter and fall off in mockery of the apocalypse.”

— Jim Harrison

71. “It seemed altogether right to him that they would drive through the small village of Paradise. It would be hard to find someone less demanding of life than Brown Dog and his current position was beyond his most strenuous ambitions.”

— Jim Harrison

72. “I couldn’t run a tight schedule, and if you’re any good at teaching, you get sucked dry because you like your students and you’re trying to help them, but you don’t have any time left to write yourself.”

— Jim Harrison

73. “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.”

— Jim Harrison

74. “I don’t know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.”

— Jim Harrison

75. “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.”

— Jim Harrison

76. “There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything. I sat down on the ground to avoid tipping over from the enormity of it all.”

— Jim Harrison

77. “No one gets over anything.”

— Jim Harrison

78. “He picked up Samuel’s saddle as if he were picking up doom herself, doom always owning the furthest, darkest reaches of the feminine gender. Pandora, Medusa, the Bacchantes, the Furies, are female though small goddesses beyond sexual notions. Who reasons death anymore than they can weigh the earth or the heart of beauty?”

— Jim Harrison

79. “Zen is the vehicle of reality.”

— Jim Harrison

80. “I’d rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.”

— Jim Harrison

81. “It takes a long time for a father to drive the love out of a child.”

— Jim Harrison

82. “Fast food is zoo food.”

— Jim Harrison

83. “I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.”

— Jim Harrison

84. “How could all this happen when there was an ocean?”

— Jim Harrison

85. “I lean against the rail and think there much be such a thing as beautiful anxiety.”

— Jim Harrison

86. “I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, “I must do this.” I can’t tell the time on the tongue of the river in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment of greenery, the dust off the canyon’s rock walls, the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.”

— Jim Harrison

87. “I’m not rational enough to be a good journalist.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

89. “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

90. “We think of life as solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid. Old Heraclitus couldn’t have stepped in the same river once, let alone twice.”

— Jim Harrison

91. “There is nothing so immediately rewarded in American life, in the arts or anything else, as a shrill and limited consciousness.”

— Jim Harrison

92. “He had been foolish enough to believe that as he recovered over the past few months the world might be recovering with him.”

— Jim Harrison

93. “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.”

— Jim Harrison

94. “I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.”

— Jim Harrison

95. “I suppose poor Adams never recovered from the suicide of his wife, though it is arguable whether anyone ever truly recovers from anything.”

— Jim Harrison

96. “New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York – in case you haven’t noticed.”

— Jim Harrison

97. “I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.”

— Jim Harrison

98. “We are all naturally xenophobic.”

— Jim Harrison

99. “A mood can be a mud puddle to be jumped over.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison