276 Quotes by Jim Harrison

Michigan is two radically different places – the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.

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.

Birds are poems I haven’t caught yet.

Animals spend a lot of time being still so when we do they lose their logical mistrust of us.

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.

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.

Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven’t had many complaints.

Some of our strangest actions are also our most deeply characteristic: secret desires remain weak fantasies unless they pervade a will strong enough to carry them out.

I don’t know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.