James Salter citations

“Toute la nuit, dans le noir, la mer avait défilé.

Sous le pont, dans leurs lits métalliques étagés les uns au-dessus des autres par rangées de six, des centaines d'hommes, silencieux, gisant pour la plupart sur le dos, n'avaient toujours pas trouvé le sommeil alors que le jour allait poindre. Les lampes étaient en veilleuse, les moteurs vrombissaient inlassablement, les ventilateurs brassaient l'air humide : quinze cents soldats, chacun avec des armes et un paquetage assez lourds pour le faire couler à pic, comme une enclume jetée dans l'océan, rien qu'une fraction de l'immense armée en route vers Okinawa, la grande île située à la pointe sud du japon.”

“Oui bien sûr, il était un peu au dessus de la moyenne comme pilote, aussi.”

“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”

“He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.”

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

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

“The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.”

“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 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.”

“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.”