Burning the Days Quotes

“Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house. Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly. Visitors come and go. At some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“I have not forgotten those days, I have only forgotten how simply they seemed to occur …”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“Families of no importance—so much is lost, entire histories, there is no room for it all. There are only the generations surging forward like the tide, the years filled with sound and froth, then being washed over by the rest. That is the legacy of the cities.”
― Vintage, Burning the Days: Recollection (Ambassador Book Awards)

“The previous night had been frenzy and excess, the morning freshness and reason.”
― Vintage, Burning the Days: Recollection (Ambassador Book Awards)

“One thing about Faulkner I like, apart from the simplicity, on the whole, of his life, was that he wrote on the bedroom walls. That seems to me the true mark of a writer.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“...at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice that the faint shrillness of age. “No, everything I’ve ever learned,”, he said, “has come from books. I’d be in the darkness without them.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“loved you very much. I might say that of Paris; my memories are heaped there. Somehow I was constantly returning—the train gliding through the endless suburbs or in blue air the airplane banking as, face close to the window, I looked down.”
― Vintage, Burning the Days: Recollection (Ambassador Book Awards)

“It was a long, beautiful fall. Many mornings I rose before dawn and went out on the bedroom balcony to read. Grasse rose blue in the distance.”
― Vintage, Burning the Days: Recollection (Ambassador Book Awards)

“In youth it feels one's concerns are everyone's. Later on it is clear that they are not. Finally they again become the same. We are all poor in the end. The lines have been spoken. The stage is empty and bare.

Before that, however, is the performance.

The curtain rises.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“When was I happiest, the happiest in my life? Difficult to say. Skipping the obvious, perhaps setting off on a journey, or returning from one. In my thirties, probably, and at scattered other times, among them the weightless days before a book was published and occasionally when writing it. It is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“But like Conrad's shipmates on the Narcissus, I never saw any of them again.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“Gevoel van moed. Groot verlangen verder te leven.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“I cannot think of it without sadness. I think of the day-long, intimate hours in her apartment with the same record playing over and over, phrases from it like some sort of oath I will know til the day I die.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

“La luz, la divinidad, la pose absoluta, donde por la mañana, en camas revueltas, en susurros, se te presenta la vida.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days

“Los poetas, los escritores, los sabios y las voces de su tiempo, forman un coro, el himno que comparten es el mismo: los grandes y pequeños se unen, lo hermoso vive, lo demás muere, y todo es absurdo excepto el honor, el amor y lo poco que el corazón conoce.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days

“Vamos allá, arriesguemos nuestras vidas. Porque si tienen algún valor, es precisamente que no tienen ninguno.”
― James Salter, Burning the Days

“Lunch near the Odéon. Paris day, a table by the window, handwritten menu, noon blue sky.”
― Vintage, Burning the Days: Recollection (Ambassador Book Awards)

“This Paris where you woke bruised after tremendous nights—indelible nights, your pockets empty, the last bills scattered on the floor, the memories scattered too.”
― Vintage, Burning the Days: Recollection (Ambassador Book Awards)

“Much has faded but not the incomparable taste of France, given then so I would always remember it. I know that taste, the yellow headlights flowing along the road at night, the towns by a river, the misty mornings, the thoughts of everything that happened there, the notes that confirmed it and made it imperishable.”
― Vintage, Burning the Days: Recollection (Ambassador Book Awards)

“The lines have been spoken. The stage is empty and bare. Before that, however, is the performance. The curtain rises.”
― Vintage, Burning the Days: Recollection (Ambassador Book Awards)

“A car pulls up at the corner and a girl in an Air France uniform with a trim, tailored skirt gets out. The car has diplomatic plates, and a pale, spent driver leans across to bid goodbye and close the door behind her. She runs, hobbled by the skirt, towards the broad glass front: AIR FRANCE. The night has ended.”
― Vintage, Burning the Days: Recollection (Ambassador Book Awards)