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James Salter QUOTES

James Salter QUOTES

1 " One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.

Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it.

A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer. "

― James Salter , Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps

2 " They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortable. 'It wouldn't work. It's the attraction of opposites,' he said.

We're not opposites.'

I don't mean just you and me. 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. "

― James Salter

3 " Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.
And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see. "

― James Salter , Light Years

4 " 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 "

― James Salter , Dusk and Other Stories

5 " The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others? "

― James Salter , Light Years

6 " there comes a time in life, when you realize that everything is a dream; only those things which are written down have any possibility of being real. "

― James Salter

7 " One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish. "

― James Salter , A Sport and a Pastime

8 " If you can overcome the occasional angst, you may have the chance to see some interesting things, perhaps the same things the tour buses bring people to see, but purified by solitude, if you will. In any case, do not stay in the hotel room. That is the only place you are vulnerable. "

― James Salter

9 " ...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist. "

― James Salter , Light Years

10 " I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful. "

― James Salter , Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps

11 " She formed her life day by day, taking as its materials the emptiness and panic as well as the rushes, like fever, of contentment. I am beyond fear of solitude, she thought, I am past it. The idea thrilled her. I am beyond it and I will not sink. This submission, this triumph made her stronger. It was as if finally, after having passed through inferior stages, her life had found a form worthy of it. "

― James Salter , Light Years

12 " Writers really don't retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot. "

― James Salter

13 " He was the friend of my life. You know, you only have one friend like that; there can't be two. "

― James Salter , Light Years

14 " But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. "

― James Salter , Light Years

15 " Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows. "

― James Salter , A Sport and a Pastime

16 " 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. "

― James Salter , All That Is

17 " His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than he ever knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page. "

― James Salter

18 " Age doesn't arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth. "

― James Salter , All That Is

19 " I can't explain it. It's what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can't do and what you must do. You just turn to dust. "

― James Salter , Light Years

20 " He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance. "

― James Salter