It’s your lack of knowledge that makes you think I’m weird and unfit.
Category: Quotes
Just now
As I think of those countless times you mentioned me to people you met, of all the things in the world, your failure to forget mentioning me is what grips me.
How easy it is for you to say a bit about me and how it weighs my heart down merely to think of all the times you could have forgotten me and it would have gone unnoticed.
possession of an idea
How would you notice the damage literature does to you when you think that you possess books, stories and thoughts?The truth is that you are possessed by them.
A perspective
I learned a beautiful lesson from life. It is that I should not have quit when I was almost failing, because I was almost failing.
The second sex
Man is defined as human being and woman is defined as female.
-Simone de Beauvoir in her book, The second sex
Quotes from Light years, James Salter
We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives. . .
She can’t walk very well. She limps. . . she can never dance. That’s why the real grace, the real music is in her.
Life is weather. Life is meals.
From Light years
There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams… one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea.
– Light years, James Salter
From Light years
There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams… one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea.
– Light years, James Salter
Words of gold
The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark … The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?
Light years, James Salter
Quotes by Virginia Woolf (On her Death Anniversary)
* For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
* Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
* The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
* There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, ‘Consume me’.
* As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
* I have lost friends, some by death…others by sheer inability to cross the street.
* I am rooted, but I flow.
* For it would seem – her case proved it – that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
* Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
* Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.
* Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
* For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
* She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
* I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.
* But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
* Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it’s place.
mind inundated 