Top 120 Jim Harrison Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Some of our strangest actions are also our most deeply characteristic: secret desires remain weak fantasies unless they pervade a will strong enough to carry them out.”

— Jim Harrison

104. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

107. “Animals spend a lot of time being still so when we do they lose their logical mistrust of us.”

— Jim Harrison

108. “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

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

— Jim Harrison

110. “Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.”

— Jim Harrison

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

— Jim Harrison

112. “Imagine if Congress were actually knowledgeable of American history.”

— Jim Harrison

113. “My advice is, do not try to inhabit another’s soul. You have your own.”

— Jim Harrison

114. “I find it impossible not to believe that there’s something in Irish blood that favors their power with words.”

— Jim Harrison

115. “I bought a ticket with the last of my money at the bus station, telling the agent that there certainly seemed to be a long, long road winding to the land of my dreams.”

— Jim Harrison

116. “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.”

— Jim Harrison

117. “We survive by learning from pain.”

— Jim Harrison

118. “I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it’s about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.”

— Jim Harrison

119. “Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.”

— Jim Harrison

120. “Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons of greed and my imperishable stupidity.”

— Jim Harrison

121. “I do have trouble with titles.”

— Jim Harrison

122. “I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.”

— Jim Harrison

123. “You don’t have to become what you already are, which is a relief.”

— Jim Harrison

124. “Pancakes with a slice of ham on top and three eggs on the slice of ham.”

— Jim Harrison

125. “There is a spine of goofiness in America that has never been deterred by literacy.”

— Jim Harrison

126. “Young people seem not to know that they are going to get old, but older people know that they are not going to become young again.”

— Jim Harrison

127. “Yeah, but now suddenly – you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.”

— Jim Harrison

128. “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.”

— Jim Harrison

129. “I followed all the rules – man’s and God’s. And you... followed none of them and they all loved you more.”

— Jim Harrison

130. “Life is short. Why not be familiar with all of it?”

— Jim Harrison

131. “Treasure what you find already in your pocket, friend.”

— Jim Harrison

132. “The present passes too quickly to notice and I’ve never had a grip on the future, even as an idea.”

— Jim Harrison

133. “How can I be lost when I’ve never been found?”

— Jim Harrison

134. “Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery.”

— Jim Harrison

135. “A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven’t quite found the words.”

— Jim Harrison

136. “In 1958 a friend in San Francisco burned out his veins shooting up hot paregoric, a cheap high. It’s safer for me to continue smoldering just below the temperature of actual flame wondering if there’s a distant land where life freely flows like a river. Years ago in a high green pasture near timberline I watched a small black bear on its back rolling back and forth and shimmying to scratch its back, pawing the air with pleasure, not likely wanting to be anywhere or anyone else.”

— Jim Harrison

137. “What is it the wind has lost that she keeps looking for under each leaf?”

— Jim Harrison

138. “You live in a beautiful place and you don’t act like you know it.”

— Jim Harrison