Quotes by James Salter

“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...”

“You must go further than I did," Nedra said. "You know that.""Further?""With your life. You must become free."She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in h...”

“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 ...”

“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”

“The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change ones life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river wa...”

“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.”

“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 me...”

“One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.”

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

“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. ...”

“...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 en...”

“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 ...”

“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 ...”

“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.”

“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 other...”

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

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

“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 writ...”

“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...”

“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.”