James Salter Quotes

Life is a bubble in a lake, that glitters for an instant, bursts, and leaves not even a blur on the water; it is the leap of a minnow, which sends a tiny ripple trembling for a few inches.

Life is a frail moth flying Caught in the web of the years that pass.

I feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.

In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.

Life is but a day; A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way From a tree's summit.

There is nothing certain in a man's life but that he must lose it.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream But of a shadow, summed with all his substance.

Mankind is a dream of a shadow.

I think we all lose in the end because we don't get to stay here forever.

All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?

Life is a winking light in the darkness.

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

The seed of mortals broods o'er passing things, and hath nought surer than the smoke-cloud's shadow.

Life is short. It can come and go like a feather in the wind.

A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door's shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.

The world's a bubble, and the life of man, Less than a span.

So passed the seasons then, so they pass now, and so they will pass in time to come, while we come and go like leaves of the tree that fall and are soon forgotten.

The shimmering night does not stay for mortals, not misfortunes, nor wealth, but in a moment it is gone, and to the turn of another comes joy and loss.

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.