Explore Quotes by James Salter

Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult.

The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.

Life is weather. Life is meals.

The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.

Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.

One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.

The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four -the years turn dry as leaves.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

A light snow, a snow so faint and small-bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold.

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.

Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.

Dresscodes are for styleless people.

Not necessarily narrow so much as impatient, intense.

It's just that it's hard to believe in greatness.

You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.

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 from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept.

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. 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.

Events need their invitation, dissolutions their start.

ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.

We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives.

Love must wait; it must break one’s bones.