Top 120 Jim Harrison Quotes (2023 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

53. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

55. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

58. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

66. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

71. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

73. “Zen is the vehicle of reality.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

75. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

79. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

81. “We are all naturally xenophobic.”

— Jim Harrison

82. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

84. “No one gets over anything.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

89. “Fast food is zoo food.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

91. “The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there’s a major explosion.”

— Jim Harrison

92. “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

93. “The heart wants life so much and the brain is shocked at the approach of death. The soldier always thinks it will be someone else, the man before or behind him, or hopefully no one he knows will ever die.”

— Jim Harrison

94. “I need the solidity of a whole book because life often doesn’t cohere for me, I mean my perception of life, and I need to find some bedrock however temporary. It’s like books help me glue the parts of my life together into an acceptable whole.”

— Jim Harrison

95. “Much earlier in this century an Austrian journalist, Karl Kraus, pointed out that if you actually perceived the true reality behind the news you would run, screaming, into the streets. I have run screaming into the streets dozens of times but have always managed to return home in time for dinner-and usually an hour early so that I can help in the preparation.”

— Jim Harrison

96. “The idea is to eat well and not die from it – for the simple reason that that would be the end of my eating.”

— Jim Harrison

97. “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

98. “I’m actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it’s the place I know best.”

— Jim Harrison

99. “When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison