Life & Wisdom Quote by Jim Harrison

The charm of Jim Harrison slipping in that “I should add” is how it stages modesty while smuggling in a worldview. It’s an offhand clause that pretends to be a footnote, but it quietly asserts a life big enough to treat major cities as “certain” pleasures, like preferred whiskeys or birds. Harrison is often read as the bard of rural appetite and wide-open solitude; this line complicates the caricature. He isn’t rejecting civilization. He’s curating it.

The diction matters: “very much enjoy” is plainspoken, almost anti-literary, a deliberate refusal of the grand pronouncement. Harrison doesn’t “adore” or “revere” cities; he enjoys them, as someone who trusts the body’s verdict more than the mind’s theories. That’s consistent with a writer whose work is full of hunger, weather, and the blunt honesty of sensory life. Cities, in this framing, aren’t moral symbols (corrupting, liberating) but environments that deliver a particular kind of charge.

And then the list: Paris, New York, Chicago. Not “Europe” and “America,” not a travel-brochure sprawl. Three cities with strong myths and strong food: Paris as the capital of taste and letters, New York as the engine of ambition, Chicago as the muscular middle where art meets grit. The subtext is allegiance without surrender. He’s claiming permission to move between the pastoral and the metropolitan, between retreat and stimulation, without turning it into a manifesto. That’s Harrison: suspicious of poses, loyal to pleasures, and always steering away from being pinned down.