Jim Harrison Quotations | Page 2

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

In a life properly lived, you’re a river,

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.

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.

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

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

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