Quotes from Jim Harrison

I have this sense of being a prematurely old man in a quarrel with himself over the worth of his life, a hopelessly bullshit notion.

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

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

I was feeling right at home all by myself. The woods can be a bit strange. It takes a long time to feel you belong there and then you never again really belong in town. It's a choice made for you by your brain at a moment you don't notice.

children, those lucky ones to whom clocks are of no consequence but who drift along on the true emotional content of time.

I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.

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

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.

He had been foolish enough to believe that as he recovered over the past few months the world might be recovering with him

It's up to poets to revive the gods.

Rumi advised me to keep my spirit up in the branches of a tree and not peek out too far, so I keep mine in the very tall willows along the irrigation ditch out back

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.

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.

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

Pain (2) ...You want to give up, throw in the towel but you can't give up because you're all you have.

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.

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

What will I die with in my hand? A paintbrush (for houses), an M15 a hammer or ax, a book a gavel, a candlestick tiptoeing upstairs. What will I hold or will I be caught with this usual thing that I want to be my heart but it is my brain and I turn it over and over and over.

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

How could all this happen when there was an ocean?

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

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.

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

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.