James Salter Quotes

“One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.”

“Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they're ready to leave”

“As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move.”

“Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.”

“He seems very mournful, but there is all the winter still to be survived. He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights.”

“The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four -the years turn dry as leaves.”

“One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.”

“France is herself Only in the winter, her naked self, without manners. In the fine weather, all the world can love her.”

“…she is simply the living portion of the meal.”

“Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult.”

“He nestles himself flat in the meeting of her buttocks. An excruciating douche.”

“I have never been able to write the story. I reach a certain point and cannot go on. The death of kings can be recited, but not of one’s child.”

“A light snow, a snow so faint and small-bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold.”

“As his prick goes into her, he discovers the world. He knows the source of numbers, the path of the stars.”

“The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.”