James Salter Quotes

Suddenly I like him. Cristina can't take her eyes away. She asks when he was born, and it turns out he's a Sagittarius which is a very good sign.
'Really?'
'It's one of the best for me,' she says. 'Scorpio is the worst.

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

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.

He could not imagine what he was doing here, what he was waiting for, what he expected to find. Paris – it was like a great terminal he was already leaving, with a multitude of signs, neon and enamel, repeated again and again as if announcing a performance. The people of Paris with their cigarettes and dogs, the stone roofs and restaurants, green buses, gray walls, he had held their attention for a moment. The affiches with his face on them had vanished but he had stayed on. He saw it clearly as, at a certain place in life, one sees both the beginning and end: Paris had discarded him.

La luz, la divinidad, la pose absoluta, donde por la mañana, en camas revueltas, en susurros, se te presenta la vida.

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.

When was I happiest, the happiest in my life? Difficult to say. Skipping the obvious, perhaps setting off on a journey, or returning from one. In my thirties, probably, and at scattered other times, among them the weightless days before a book was published and occasionally when writing it. It is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.

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.

Of Bryan, it might be said that he was candid about his wife and uncomplaining. He treated her offhandedly, as he might treat bad weather.

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.

Any two people when they separate, it's like splitting a log. The pieces aren't even. One of them contains the core.

...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."

Every object, even those which had been hers, which he never touched, seemed to share his loss. He was suddenly parted from his life. That presence, loving or not, which fills the emptiness of rooms, mildens them, makes them light — that presence was gone. The simple greed that makes one cling to a woman left him suddenly desperate, stunned. A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained.

A soft light, God's idleness.

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