James Salter Quotes

Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

If it seems like I've been lost in 'lets remember', If it seems I'm gettin' older and missin' my younger days, well you shoulda known me much better, cause the past is something that never got in my way.

I learned from my past.

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

I'm in a position to look back at my life, and I realized there were a number of experiences that needed to be documented.

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.

When I look back at the 1980s I pinch myself. Did I really do all that?

No graduation speaker will ever tell you that the future is anything but uncertain. It never is. But graduations need not only be obsessed with looking ahead; a graduation can be a day on which we turn back and trace our steps to see how we ended up where we are.

I must admit, maybe I am a piece of history after all.

As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.

So often, we don't realize that the very moments in which we live become our history, our story.

Achievements are often more interesting to you when you look back on them.

As I've grown older, I appreciate what I had at Lilly even more than I did back then.

I couldn't tell you what was my last performance before I was incarcerated. I couldn't tell you what last meal I had, or anything of those things because I didn't think about it; it wasn't important to me. I think about it now. I can tell you everything I ate for the past week. I think that alone makes me a better person.

And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory.

We all have appointments with the past.

People who keep journals have life twice

We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.

Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

If you have lived, take thankfully the past. Make, as you can, the sweet remembrance last.

You do learn from what you've done in the past.