"A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed."
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Quote collection
Jim Harrison quotes (page 3 of 5)
98 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit."
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"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)"
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"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."
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"Being a writer requires an intoxication with language."
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"All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners."
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"Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right."
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"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."
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"It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs."
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"Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot."
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"After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do."
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"I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that."
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"When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness."
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"No one else can hold your hand or take this voyage of the soul for you."
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"Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about. -- True North"
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"That is simply the most beautiful publishing office in the world, with that cranky old building in that wonderful park."
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"Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels."
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"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."
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"That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it."
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"I can write anywhere."
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