Jim Harrison Quotes - Page 2

The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit.

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

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

My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.

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.

It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn't keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it's standing thigh deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of life. You easily recognize this mortality and it dissipates into the landscape.

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.

Perhaps when we die our names are takenfrom us by a divine magnet and are freeto flutter here and there within the bodies of birds.I'll be a simple crowwho can reach the top of Antelope Butte.(From: Hard Times)

Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.

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.

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

Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.

Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, "Que pasa, baby?

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.

That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.

Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about. -- True North

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

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

The days are stacked against what we think we are.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

Zen is the vehicle of reality.

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

Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits.

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

Wherever we go we do harm, forgiving ourselves as wheels do cement for wearing each other out. We set this house on fire, forgetting that we live within. (from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)