Salter Quotes & Sayings

You have to keep going. You have to. If you push through this, you'll show them. You'll show them you didn't deserve this. — Aimee L. Salter

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. — James Salter

He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights, each one perilous as a lunar journey. He — James Salter

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, Light Years, James Salter writes: "For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the pardox."1 A — Tim Kreider

Every nation feels itself to be superior, but in America it's a jaunty feeling, and in some cases a rather ominous one among the super-patriots. — James Salter

She preferred to lie up by the dunes with the waves bursting, to listen while they crashed like the final chords of a symphony except they went on and on. There was nothing as fine as that. — James Salter

Most writers can write three times as many books as I have and still live a life. — James Salter

They are travelling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levis and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams. — James Salter

People you love should always be more important than people who judge you. — Aimee L. Salter

God forgives not capriciously, but with wise, definite, Divine pre arrangement; forgives universally, on the grounds of atonement and on the condition of repentance and faith. — Richard Salter Storrs

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing. — James Salter

You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true. — James Salter

Life is weather. Life is meals, — James Salter

Malevolence takes a bite out off your spirit. Just sitting with it, just talking with people who consciously and deliberately exploit others, feels like being beaten. Over the years, l have seen many therapists burn out and leave the field entirely. [Refers to treating sex offenders, p6] — Anna C. Salter

One should not believe too easily in a life which can easily vanish. — James Salter

Once, in a three-day taping that included several sadists, the material was so overwhelming that both the film crew and I got sick - I with a sinus infection, and the entire film crew with a flu so severe they had to delay their departure from the motel. Our immune systems had weakened, I believe, from the beating out souls had taken. — Anna C. Salter

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

I wasn't about to tell him that I never said anything to anyone who teased me. I just went along with it like it was my joke too. I wanted everyone to like me ... — Sydney Salter

I think it's because he likes you.'
'Well, that's too bad. I've given up that kind of thing.'
'What kind of thing?'
'Love, dating, the inevitable ensuing heartbreak. — Sydney Salter

Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it, the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth. — James Salter

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable. — James Salter

He walks toward the river, placing his feet carefully. His suit is too warm and tight. He reaches the water's edge. There is the dock, unused now, with its flaking paint and rotten boards, its underpilings drenched in green. Here at the great, dark river, here on the bank. It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore. Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last. — James Salter

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything. — James Salter

And I said to myself, here's the problem with the world: The Italians are too Italian, and nobody else is Italian enough. — Mary Jo Salter

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 landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. — James Salter

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 patches of stratus that lay in the valleys as heavy and white as glaciers. North for the first time. It was still an adventure, as exciting as love, as frightening. — James Salter

Shopping is really complicated if you are a girl. — Helen Salter

For those we are born to speak to we need prepare nothing, the lines are ready, everything is there. — James Salter

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 her case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone. — James Salter

None of this is true. I've said Autun, but it could easily have been Auxerre. I'm sure you'll come to realize that. I am only putting down details which entered me, fragments that were able to part my flesh. It's a story of things that never existed although even the faintest doubt of that, the smallest possibility, plunges everything into darkness. I only want whoever reads this to be as resigned as I am. There's enough passion in the world already. Everything trembles with it. Not that I believe it shouldn't exist, no, no, but this is only a thin, reflecting sliver which somehow keeps catching the light. — James Salter

It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen. — James Salter

You can't be admitted to the ranks of writers of importance unless you have sales. — James Salter

Strauss's, for instance, which begins in the heavens. The artist doesn't ascend to glory, he appears in it, he already has it and the world is prepared to recognize him. Meteoric, like a comet - those are the phrases we apply, and it's true, it is a kind of burning. It makes them highly visible, and at the same time it consumes them, and it's only afterwards, when the brilliance is gone, when their bones are lying alongside those of lesser men, that one can really judge. I mean, there are famous works, renowned in antiquity, and today absolutely forgotten: books, buildings, works of art. — James Salter

People, in general, tend to project onto others their own state of mind. Well-meaning people inevitably assume other people are well meaning. People who cheat assume everyone cheats. People who deceive assume everybody deceives.
Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998 — Anna C. Salter

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another. — James Salter

I think you can be taught to write. You can't be taught to be a good writer. For that, you have to bring something to it, yourself, something that can't be given to you. — James Salter

He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before the rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given. — James Salter

The capacity of sex offenders for denial, rationalization, and minimization of their deviant behavior is confirmed by Salter's (1995) finding that the population she has interviewed seemed rather proud of their ability to manuipulate their victims into remaining attached and loyal to them. Salter notes that frequently child abusers target their victims by calculating their probably vulnerability relative to other children, recognizing that those already being abused by others are better prey than the never-molested children. — Harvey L. Schwartz

It was easy to find things she would like. Our taste was the same, it had been from the first. It would be impossible to live with someone otherwise. I've always thought it was the most important single thing, though people may not realize it. Perhaps it's transmitted to them in the way someone dresses or, for that matter, undresses, but taste is a thing no one is born with, it's learned, and at a certain point it can't be altered. We sometimes talked about that, what could and couldn't be altered. People were always saying something had completely changed them, some experience or book or man, but if you knew how they had been before, nothing much really had changed. When you found someone who was tremendously appealing but not quite perfect, you might believe you could change them after marriage, not everything, just a few things, but in truth the most you could expect was to change perhaps one thing and even that would eventually go back to what it had been. — James Salter

WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back. — James Salter

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have. — James Salter

Great lovers lie in hell, the poet says. Even now, long afterwards, I cannot destroy the images. They remain within me like the yearnings of an addict. I need only hear certain words, see certain gestures, and my thoughts begin to tumble. I despise myself for thinking of her. Even if she were dead, I would feel the same. Her existence blackens my life. — James Salter

Normally, what you're envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels ... almost nonexistent things. — James Salter

You're so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently. — James Salter

Love must wait; it must break one's bones. — James Salter

My swimming cap was really sprouting leaks these days. The thing is, you could patch over the holes, but it would never be the same. Like my love life. — Helen Salter

A lie carries a weight that is exponentially higher than the truth. It's weight will retard growth directly in proportion to the area lied. — Howard L. Salter

Sonnet III: Black Coffin opened wide for all to See

Black Coffin opened wide for all to See,
The lifeless form of one I loved so dear.
O, listen! mournful knells that soon shall be
All night long tolling for the folk to hear.
The lanterns overlight the old churchyard
To watch the coffin lowered into the ground;
Soon Frost shall grasp the turf already hard,
Decay ye have to face without a sound.
But years have pass'd herein do I relate
My dear sweet mother's form within my mind.
Still happiness fills all my heart and state,
As I see my small family so kind.
Love cannot be withheld by death or grave,
It stays alive within the heart so brave. — Timothy Salter

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural. — James Salter

He unrolls names like a splendid carpet. — James Salter

The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly; part of this town and happy. I lean out of the window and am washed by the cool air, air it seems no one has yet breathed. — James Salter

In the early 1990s, a group of people accused of sexual abuse formed the 'False Memory Syndrome Foundation' (FMSF). The FMSF's primary goal was to advocate on behalf of parents accused of child sexual abuse by their adult children, but the Foundation also became an important resource for people accused of sexual abuse by minors. Importantly, the Foundation attracted academics from a range of discliplines whose experise had been contested or challenged by the legitimisation of children's and women's testimony of sexual abuse. — Michael Salter

But in any case, validity, offender self-reports have dubious validity, especially when the offender's self-interest is at stake. The only rule for deception in sex offenders I have ever found is this: If it is in the offender's best interests to lie, and if he can do it and not get caught, he will lie.
Being victimized as a child has become a ready excuse for perpetrating child molestation. The offender who claims he himself was victimized gets seen as less of a "monster" than one who wasn't a victim, and he gains much more empathy and support. It is hard to trust self-reports of sex offenders about abuse in their past when such reports are in their best interest.
Only a few studies on this topic have used objective measures, and they have found very different results.[102] — Anna C. Salter

The art of tea, whichever way you drink it, or whichever country you are from, has one underlining thread for all of us. It is the cultivation of yourself as you follow the ceremony of preparing your tea, the way in which you make your tea, how and where you drink it, and with whom. Making a cup of tea creates a space for just being. — Nicola Salter

Enjoy The
Sound Of Silence. — Timothy Salter

DEAD FLIES ON THE SILLS OF sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty. The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist's wax, the organ has been gutted. — James Salter

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling. — James Salter

Whether you do your work with notes or without them, do it courageously, earnestly, with devotion; with a glad sense of the greatness of it, and a full consecration of every force and faculty to it. — Richard Salter Storrs

I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords. — James Salter

James Salter has been a fighter pilot, a rogue, and a climber. He counts Robert Redford as a friend. — Stephen Rodrick

I'd say the biggest relationship is the repetition of certain themes. I don't want to say "topics," but certain points of interest. — James Salter

Bowman, too, had been born in a great city, in the French Hospital in Manhattan, in the burning heat of August and very early in the morning when all geniuses are born, as Pearson once told him. There had been an unbreathing stillness, and near dawn faint, distant thunder. It grew slowly louder, then gusts of cooler air before a tremendous storm broke with lightning and sheets of rain, and when it was over, — 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 one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.
And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see. — James Salter

The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions. — James Salter

It's tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it. — James Salter

Miyata was fluent and intelligent. Nothing was beyond his curiosity. He seemed to be above the confusion of life, as if he had been commissioned to spend his own in undisturbed judgement of the world about him, protected always by a mandate from the gods. They spoke briefly of Korea and then of the past war with the United States. Miyata had been in Japan for its entire duration and must have been deeply affected, but when he talked about it, it was without bitterness. Wars were not of his doing. He considered them almost poetically, as if they were seasons, the cruel winters of man, even though almost all the work he had done in the 1930s and early 1940s had been lost when his house was burned in the great incendiary raid of 1944. He described the night vividly, the endless hours, the bombers thundering low over the storms of fire. — James Salter

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

You have your brains, but it's energy and desire that make you write a book. — James Salter

Certain people can keep a word tune, so to speak, and certain people cannot. And, above all, certain people can tell a story, and other people can't. They don't hear that point where something else has to come. — James Salter

Smoke and mirrors' is a useful metaphor for the ways in which organised abuse has chided conceptualisation and understanding. The chapter provides an overview of cite often incendiary debates over organised abuse before going on to suggest that critical theories on gender, crime and intersubjectivity may offer new insights into the phenomenon. — Michael Salter

I don't fear death. I'm not obsessed with it the way everybody else seems to be. — James Salter

I've made an effort to nurture the feminine in myself. I don't mean overtly, but in terms of response to things. — James Salter

Having friends was really important, wasn't it? Even if sometimes they did stuff which upset you? — Helen Salter

Jivan: 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.
Nedra: I haven't been looking for it.
Jivan: It's like a tree ... It takes a long time to grow. It has roots very deep, and these roots stretch out a long way, farther than you know. You can't cut it, just like that. — James Salter

Every object, even those which had been hers, which he never touched, seemed to share his loss. He was suddenly parted from his life. That presence, loving or not, which fills the emptiness of rooms, mildens them, makes them light - that presence was gone. The simple greed that makes one cling to a woman left him suddenly desperate, stunned. A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained. — James Salter

Yet this thou art alive, but if ye soar,
My poor frail heart will have beat out its cry
And sadly miss thy sweet form all the more
While helplessly I stand and watch you die. — Timothy Salter

I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression. — Richard Salter Storrs

She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It's all in silence - she is made out of yesterdays. — James Salter

One feels pan of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there's an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it. — James Salter

Because this isn't the movies, Doc. In the real world, when a seventeen-year-old guy gets a love letter from his best friend, he doesn't suddenly decide to love her back. He runs screaming. — Aimee L. Salter

There is no situation like the open road, and seeing things completely afresh. I'm used to traveling. It's not a question of meeting or seeing new faces particularly, or hearing new stories, but of looking at life in a different way. It's the curtain coming up on another act. — James Salter

THERE ARE THINGS I LOVE ABOUT marriage. I love the familiarity of it," Nedra said. "It's like a tattoo. You wanted it at the time, you have it, it's implanted in your skin, you can't get rid of it. You're hardly even aware of it any more. I suppose I'm very conventional," she decided. — James Salter

My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy on every page. I suppose I am trying to write such a book. — James Salter

Although I've made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house. — James Salter

I intend that my last work shall be a cookbook composed of memories and desires.
Alexander Dumas, 1869, as quoted in Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days by James and Kay Salter — Alexandre Dumas

Look back to the cross, and the disciples gazing on it in terror from afar, and then look around on the nations that are influenced by the faith that there centres
and note the change! Then take these elements, established in history, and calculate the orbit Christianity is to fill. — Richard Salter Storrs

They had a great deal in common, Bowman a little defiantly said. What they had in common was more vital than similar interests
it was wordless understanding and accord. It was love, the furnace into which everything is dropped. — James Salter

I should meet many people who do not know anyone personally who has been raped or molested as a child. But I can't remember seeing a newspaper without a rape or molestation charge in it somewhere, and when I ask groups how many people know someone personally with a history of molestation, almost always, every hand in the room goes up. — Anna C. Salter

I've known the anxiety of being completely lost, flying at night. It can be extreme. You're travelling at close to five hundred miles an hour, and every minute that goes by takes you further into being lost unless you get help from ground radar somewhere or somehow figure out the error. — James Salter

Money is that dear thing which,
if you're not careful, you can squander
your whole life thinking of ... — Mary Jo Salter

When Vivian began to recover they brought her a fluted glass vase with an arrangement of lilies and yellow roses from the flower shop on Eighteenth Street owned by an elegant man Arthur had once been involved with, Christos, who was friends with both of them. He, too, loved the theater and everything about it. Later he opened a restaurant. — James Salter

It is a political fight between a group of well-financed, well-organized people whose freedom, livelihood, finances, reputations, or liberty is being threatened by disclosures of child sexual abuse and--on the other hand--a group of well-meaning, ill-organized, underfinanced, and often terribly naive academics who expect fair play. — Anna C. Salter

West Pointers tend to be rigorously honest - more than necessary, in my view. — James Salter

To them, eternal life begins
And God Himself shall wipe away all tears. — Timothy Salter

It isn't what happens to you in your life that destroys you. It's what you do about it. — Aimee L. Salter

The classic decision is always the same, whether to retreat or go on. There comes a time when it is easier to continue upward, when the summit, in fact, is the only way out. At such a moment one must still have strength. — James Salter

There are men who seem to have seized the trunk of life, and he was one of them. It might not be for everyone, the great, scarring thing you could not get your arms around, but it was there for him. — James Salter

I've always said that I felt women are more heroic. — James Salter

We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun. — James Salter

Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer. — James Salter