James Salter Quotes

63 quotes in 980 categories

• Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground, they were crossing…
• You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and…
• Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain…
• Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one…
• 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…
• There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.
• 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.…
• It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen.
• There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this…
• I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love.
• 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:…
• We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives...
• It's just that it's hard to believe in greatness...
• ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
• Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source…
• You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
• Love must wait; it must break one’s bones.
• Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.
• Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.
• Dresscodes are for styleless people.

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