Quotes from James Salter

Er komt een tijd dat je alleen bent, schreef Céline lang voordat het hem echt overkwam, als je aan het eind bent gekomen van alles wat je overkomen kan. Het is het einde van de wereld, zelfs verdriet, je eigen verdriet, geeft geen antwoord meer en je moet op je schreden terugkeren, je weer onder de mensen begeven, het maakt niet uit wie.

The children playing by the fountains will become old men, but nothing of this will have changed

She has a narrow mouth, cast down at the corners, weighted there by the sourness of knowledge.

There comes a time when you realize everything is a dream. And only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

Mythology has accepted him, images he cannot really believe in, images brief as dreams. The sweat rolls down his arms. He tumbles into the damp leaves of love, he rises clean as air. There is nothing about her he does not adore. When they are finished, she lies quiet and limp, exhausted by it all. She has become entirely his, and they lie like drunkards, their bare limbs crossed. In the cold distance the bells begin, filling the darkness, clear as psalms.

There were other houses that always brought images of an orderly life, kitchens with plain sideboards, old windows, the comforts of marriage in their common form, which at times surpassed everything—breakfast in the morning, conversations, late hours, and nothing that suggested excess or decay.

There is no happiness like this: quiet mornings, light from the river, the weekend ahead. They lived a Russian life, a rich life, interwoven, in which the misfortune of one would stagger them all. It was a garment, this life. Its beauty outside, its warmth within.

The bombing of the main islands of Japan was now possible, and in the most massive of the raids, a firebombing of Tokyo, more than eighty thousand people died in the huge inferno in a single night.

Dingen die je geschreven hebt, rijpen niet met je mee, zo lijkt me althans. De waarheid ervan kan bepaald zijn door de tijd, maar er bestaat niet zoiets als bij de tijd zijn wanneer de tijd voorbij is. Boeken blijven bestaan buiten de tijd om of ze houden op te bestaan. Dat is zoals het gaat in de literatuur. Boeken markeren een periode of een plaats, en geleidelijk worden ze die tijd en plaats'.

Afterwards they lie for a long time in silence. There is nothing. Their poem is scattered about them. The days have fallen everywhere, they have collapsed like cards. The air has a chill in it. He pulls the covers up. She is so perfectly still she seems asleep. He touches her face. It is wet with tears.

But like Conrad's shipmates on the Narcissus, I never saw any of them again.

whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.

To understand everything is to love nothing

My own life suddenly seems nothing, an old costume, a collection of rags, and I walk, I breathe to the rhythm of his which is stronger than mine.

You think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has it. It's not true. It's very hard to find.

Gevoel van moed. Groot verlangen verder te leven.

We live untruth amid evidence of untruth.

But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one's own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.

There's a time in life when everything becomes ex—ex-athlete, ex-president, expatriate, x-ray.

Their life was two things: it was a life, more or less—at least it was the preparation for one—and it was an illustration of life for their children.

The courage to live when the best days were past.

suddenly felt frightened. He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.

Afterwards he sat with the paper, the Sunday edition, immense and sleek, which had lain unopened in the hall. In it were articles, interviews, everything fresh, unimagined; it was like a great ship, its decks filled with passengers, a directory in which was entered everything that had made any difference to the city, the world. A great vessel sailing each day, he longed to be on it, to enter its salons, to stand near the rail.

Some things, as I say, I saw, some discovered, and some dreamed, and I can no longer differentiate between them. But my dreams are as important as anything I acquired by stealth. More important, because they are the intuitive in its purest state. Without them, facts are no more than a kind of debris, unstrung, like beads. The dreams are as true and manifest as the iron fences of France flashing black in the rain. More true, perhaps. They are the skeleton of all reality.