"We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small."
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Quote collection
Jim Harrison quotes (page 2 of 5)
98 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it."
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"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)"
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"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."
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"We set this house on fire forgetting that we live within."
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"You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it."
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"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."
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"The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That's why I ran to the woods."
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"The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it."
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"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."
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"I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance."
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"My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own."
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"Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch."
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"Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be."
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"Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger."
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"What cannot be said, will get wept."
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"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."
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"I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence."
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"The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it."
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"Zen is the vehicle of reality."
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