Jim Harrison Quotes

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

In a life properly lived, you're a river.

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

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

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.

Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.

I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don't know what.

Death steals everything except our stories.

I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

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

I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.

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.

I remember my grandfather telling me how each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape the aloneness.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I was a dog on a short chain / and now there's no chain.

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

What cannot be said, will get wept.