Jim Harrison Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.

2. His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else.(from the novella, The Man Who Gave Up His Name) Legends of the Fall

3. It's very difficult to look at the Worldand into your heart at the same time.In between, a life has passed. After Ikkyu & Other Poems

4. Perhaps swimming was dancing under the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and bluegills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread. The Man Who Gave Up His Name

5. Wherever we go we do harm, forgivingourselves as wheels do cement for wearingeach other out. We set this houseon fire, forgetting that we live within.(from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)