276 Quotes by Jim Harrison

I hadn’t noticed the green of summer enough and now the colors were gray and white and black.

I write novellas because I don’t like loose sprawling prose.

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.

When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought.

We think of life as solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid. Old Heraclitus couldn’t have stepped in the same river once, let alone twice.

A mood can be a mud puddle to be jumped over.

I couldn’t run a tight schedule, and if you’re any good at teaching, you get sucked dry because you like your students and you’re trying to help them, but you don’t have any time left to write yourself.

I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, “I must do this.” I can’t tell the time on the tongue of the river in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment of greenery, the dust off the canyon’s rock walls, the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.

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.