The Hunters Quotes

“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, The Hunters

“Every glance made him need another.”
― James Salter, The Hunters

“He was thinking of the girl who would not be a maid and the other who waited for her American lover. He envied them. He would have liked to enter their fairy tale with them, their opera; for it seemed somehow that, despite the sadness, when the curtain fell they would find the youth in them to laugh and go elsewhere.”
― James Salter, The Hunters