James Salter Quotes

We live untruth amid evidence of untruth.

Life is composed of certain basic elements" he says. "Of course, there are a lot of impurities, that's what's misleading. [...] What I'm saying may sound mystical, but in everybody, Ame, in all of us, there's the desire to find those elements somehow, to discover them, you know? Sometimes I think they're the same for all of us, but maybe they're not. I mean, we look at the Greeks and say, ah, they built this civilization, this whole brilliant world, out of certain, simple things. Why can't we? And if not a civilization, why can't each of us, properly directed, build a life, I mean a happy life? Believe me, the elements exist. When you enter certain rooms, when you look at certain faces, suddenly you realize you're in the presence of them. Do you know what I mean?

«Pero el conocimiento no te protege. La vida desprecia el conocimiento, lo obliga a esperar sentado en la antesala, a esperar fuera. Pasión, energía, mentiras: eso es lo que la vida admira. No obstante, todo es soportable si la humanidad entera observa. Lo demuestran los mártires. Vivimos dentro de la atención ajena. Nos volvemos hacia ella como flores hacia el sol.

No hay una vida completa. Hay sólo fragmentos. Hemos nacido para no tener nada, para que todo se nos pierda entre los dedos. Y, sin embargo, esta pérdida, este diluvio de encuentros, luchas, sueños... hay que ser irreflexivo, como una tortuga. Hay que ser resuelto, ciego. Pues cualquier cosa que hagamos, incluso que no hagamos, nos impide hacer la cosa opuesta. Los actos demuelen sus alternativas, he aquí la paradoja. La vida, por tanto, consiste en elecciones, cada cual definitiva y de poca trascendencia, como tirar piedras al mar. Hemos tenido hijos, pensó; nunca podremos no tener hijos. Hemos sido mesurados, jamás sabremos lo que es despilfarrar nuestra vida…»

Every glance made him need another.

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.

He was thinking of the girl who would not be a maid and the other who waited for her American lover. He envied them. He would have liked to enter their fairy tale with them, their opera; for it seemed somehow that, despite the sadness, when the curtain fell they would find the youth in them to laugh and go elsewhere.

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

I see myself as an agent provocateur or as a double agent, first on one side — that of truth — and then on the other, but between these, in the reversals, the sudden defections, one can easily forget allegiance entirely and feel only the deep, the profound joy of being beyond all codes, of being completely independent, criminal is the word. Like any agent, of course, I cannot divulge my sources. I can merely say that some things I saw myself, some I discovered, for after all, the mutilation, the delay of as little as a single word can reveal the existence of something worthy to be hidden, and I became obsessed with discovery, like the great detectives. I read every scrap of paper. I noted every detail. 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.

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

stripped of all but a single, last possession, a ring, a photograph, or letter that represented everything dearest and forever left behind that they somehow hoped, it being so small, they would be able to take with them. He had such a letter, from Enid. The days I spent with you were the greatest days of my life …

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.

I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.

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.

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

...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."