James Salter

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.

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

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

...she is simply the living portion of the meal.

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

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

He nestles himself flat in the meeting of her buttocks. An excruciating douche.

I have never been able to write the story. I reach a certain point and cannot go on. The death of kings can be recited, but not of one’s child.

The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.

He seems very mournful, but there is all the winter still to be survived. He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights.

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.

As his prick goes into her, he discovers the world. He knows the source of numbers, the path of the stars.