Quotes from James Salter

Dean is still asleep. His clothes are strewn about. The shutters are closed. He never dreams. He's like a dead musician, like a spent runner. He hasn't the strength to dream, or rather, his dreams take place while he is awake and they are marvelous for at least one quality: he has the power to prolong them.

She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It's all in silence - she is made out of yesterdays.

One feels pan of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there's an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it.

It was among the knowledgeable others that one hoped to be talked about and admired. It was not impossible—the world of squadrons is small. The years would bow to you; you would be remembered, your name like a thoroughbred's, a horse that ran and won.

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.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit.

They had a great deal in common, Bowman a little defiantly said. What they had in common was more vital than similar interests--it was wordless understanding and accord. It was love, the furnace into which everything is dropped.

Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.

We think of Rome as an empire in a way that we do not use for other nations. The others are pretenders. Rome stands alone. Throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Near East its wreckage still draws the traveler and speaks a message that is haunting: this was imperial, this was lasting, this is gone.

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

We cannot imagine these diseases, they are called idiopathic, spontaneous in origin, but we know instinctively there must be something more, some invisible weakness they are exploiting. It is impossible to think they fall at random, it is unbearable to think it.

One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess. And in turn, they give some back. They do not last forever. They fade. They vanish. They are surpassed, forgotten — one hears of them no more.

She had accepted the limitations of her life. It was this anguish, this contentment which created her grace.

Suddenly I am crushed by the simplicity of it all: he is leaving.

at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice that the faint shrillness of age. "No, everything I've ever learned,", he said, "has come from books. I'd be in the darkness without them.

Life is separated by scars, like the rings in the inside of a tree.

She had lost interest in her marriage. There was nothing else to say. It was a prison. 'No, I'll tell you what it is , I'm indifferent to it . I am bored with happy couples. I don't believe in them. They're false.They're deceiving themselves.

Cuando amas, imaginas el futuro de acuerdo con tus sueños.

The heart is in darkness, unknowing, like those animals in mines that have never seen the day. It has no loyalties, no hopes; it has its task.

Every glance made him need another.

The classic decision is always the same, whether to retreat or go on. There comes a time when it is easier to continue upward, when the summit, in fact, is the only way out. At such a moment one must still have strength.

Like Lucifer, he creates darkness as he descends.

How can we imagine what our lives would be without the illumination of the lives of others?

Greatness is something which can be regarded in a number of ways," he said. "It is, of course, the apotheosis, man raised to his highest powers, but it also can be, in a way, like insanity, a certain kind of imbalance, a flaw, in most cases a beneficial flaw, an anomaly, an accident." "Well, many great men are eccentric," Viri said, "even narrow." "Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.