Dalva Quotes

“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.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“the natural world seemed to absorb the poison in me.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“How could all this happen when there was an ocean?”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“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.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“It was a strange drive, a sense that you could see the June heat lifting off the earth, the greenness darkening as the twilight waned. Far off the west there were thunderheads that caught the sun we could no longer see and made the air yellowish. We took a gravel road norh that dead-ended at the Niobrara River, the wind around the speeding car too loud for talk.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“I learned this dish, among dozens of others, when I was with a young man who wanted to live a simple, Third World existence, which turned out to be amazingly complicated for me — I did the shopping, tended the garden, cooked the natural food, kept the house, while he meditated. When he stopped making love in order to achieve yer another ‘level’ I moved out. The sixties were like that. He now owns a Mercedes dealership in Florida he bought by wholesaling cocaine. The seventies!”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“I saw a doe and a fawn but Sonia chased them away, roaring as if they meant us harm. I rehearsed my entire life and I heard my heart for the first time. In the morning I had fantasies of love and laughter, even creating the image of Duane and my father riding horseback up the drawn toward me.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“You have to study extremely hard and find some subject or profession you’re obsessed with because in our culture it has been very hard on the attractive women I know. They are leered at, teased, abused, set on a pedestal, and no one takes them seriously, so you have to use all your energies to develop the kind of character that can withdraw this bullshit. You don’t want to waste your life reacting to it. Don’t waste your time on men who talk and stare but don’t listen to you. They just want to fuck you. Women I’ve known in your position get easily depressed because they are valued for something, their looks, which they had nothing to do with, you get it? It’s all genetic. And there’s a lot of envy from other women.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“Work could be anything that aroused your curiosity: the natural world, music, anthropology, the stars, or even sewing or gardening. When we were little girls we would invent dresses the Queen of Egypt might wear, or have a special garden where we ordered seeds for vegetables or flowers we had never heard of.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“I just now know that you can only meet a man at the level of his intentions.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“people have an instinct to be useful and can’t handle the relentless everydayness of life unless they work hard. It is sheer idleness that deadens the soul and causes neuroses.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“By not letting places be themselves we show our contempt for them. We bury them in sentiment, then suffocate them to death in one way or another. I can ruin both the desert and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by carrying to them an insufferable load of distinctions that disallows actually seeing the flora and fauna or the paintings. Children are usually better at finding mushrooms and arrowheads because they are either ignorant of or unwilling to carry the load.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“There is a spine of goofiness in America that has never been deterred by literacy”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything. I sat down on the ground to avoid tipping over from the enormity of it all.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“While it is a truism that man has not learned much more than the sexual act, and that fire burns when you stick your hand into it, it behooves the scholar to immerse himself in the analyses of the problem, rather than the problem itself. One”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“If the Nazis had won the war the Holocaust, finally, would have been set to music, just as our victorious and bloody trek west is accompanied on film by thousands of violins and kettle drums.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“Take courage, the earth is all that lasts.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“I must have awakened and fallen back to sleep a hundred times that night, listening to the wind rattle the palm fronds, the party noise of people jumping in the pool, the slurred shouts that the humidity and walls softened until all the words and dreams in the world became round.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“Paul was a strong person in every respect and it made us all feel much better that he was there.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“Now there’s a specific banality to rage as a reaction, an unearned sense of cleansing virtue.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“He’s quite a thinker. I stood up and started to take off my clothes. He got down on the floor. We really went to town all evening and I sent him home before midnight.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“She sounded untypically merry on the phone, enjoying the rare whorish feeling she was sure would pass.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“Of course he wasn’t listening to what I said but to all of his imagined resonances of what I said.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“I never met a normal person and neither have you.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“It was today—rather yesterday I think—that he told me it was important not to accept life as a brutal approximation.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“I caught myself being drawn ceaselessly back into a past that I wished mightily to emerge from -- I had come to know only recently that one *could* emerge without forgetting, and that to remember need not be to suffocate.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“I found a stock tank and let the horse drink, then tethered it and lifted the dog over the edge and watched it swim in happy circles. I got pretty wet lifting the dog out of the tank but didn't care -- there is something about doing a favor for a dog that calms you down.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“I began walking at your age just because the natural world seemed to absorb the poison in me.”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva

“Earlier, when I made my coffee (after releasing my grateful geese), I sat at the big Northridge desk and got out the Edward Curtis portfolio for breakfast reading. When I untied the first folio there was a note—“Dalva & Ruth. Wash your hands. I love you. Grandpa.” A simple old note, brittle with age, but I was momentarily overcome with loneliness for her; at the same time, though, I knew in a deeper sense that I was totally out of the running. In the long and short of it, love is a more difficult subject than sex. Or history. I”
― Jim Harrison, Dalva