James Salter Quotes

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love.

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

Life is wasted on the living.

It was despairing to find out that I am mortal.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.

There are these moments in the military where you're present at these enormous intersections of history and humanity. I came out of the end of that, and I just wanted to write. If you do it well, you know it will last. It can't get blown away like everything else.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing.

But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok'd souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death