Jim Harrison Quotes

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.

I seek the substantial in life.

Christ rose so long ago but the air
he rose through hasn't forgotten
the slight red contrail from the wounds.

I don't want to get married or run away. I want my free will. I just want to love someone and not get fucked over.

The world gave one so many reasons to be pissed off at it.

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

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.

I must have awakened and fallen back to sleep a hundred times that night, listening to the wind rattle the palm fronds, the party noise of people jumping in the pool, the slurred shouts that the humidity and walls softened until all the words and dreams in the world became round.

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

As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done among the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny that allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work.

Paul was a strong person in every respect and it made us all feel much better that he was there.

The feathers on your chin mean that you ate the parakeet.

I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.

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.

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.