James 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."

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

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

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

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

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

"The dreams are the skeleton of all reality."

"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 d…"