2015 Reading List
A Sport and a Pastime: Open Road by James Salter
You have 16 highlighted passages
Last annotated on February 12, 2014
Plates being silently removed, the taste of foods lingering. The immortal procession of a French meal. We’ve finished the wine.
Read more at location 413
Around her neck there are festoons of glass beads the color of nightclub kisses.
Read more at location 569
hear him come in. I am reading. I appear to be. Henry the Fourth is beautifying Paris, building the Place Royale, the Pont-Neuf. I keep going over the same lines again and again. I can tell what has happened, but I cannot bring myself to say anything. Nothing. I am possessed of nothing but phrases as heavy as logs.
Read more at location 754
He is drained of all invention and also aware, for the first time, that she is fully able to speak, to create images strong enough to alter his life.
Read more at location 793
She comes to life with a soft, exhausted sound, like someone saved from drowning.
Read more at location 810
As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move.
Read more at location 846
She’s not young, but rather in the midst of that last and most confident beauty, like the mother of a schoolmate. You see her emerging from a car, the flash of an elegant calf,
Read more at location 897
Her teeth are hypnotic. Her smile crushes one’s hope.
Read more at location 908
She has her moments. Still, it’s dangerous to believe in what she seems to be. One often has the impression there is another, desperate woman underneath, but this is the extent of her power, this intimation of sexual wealth. Billy always talks about how beautiful she is. It’s almost as if he’s protesting: but she is beautiful. And she is. Their life is arranged to exhibit this beauty. They treat it like the possession of a fine house.
Read more at location 929
The bath of anger has left them happier. It’s like a pruning.
Read more at location 1274
Among the dancers turning in the orange light his eyes can find her in an instant. He knows her calves, the shape of her body better than her lover, and those high-heeled shoes with their thin straps, as they move around the floor they are ripping his dreams.
Read more at location 1595
The buildings all seem empty. It’s like a great estate, the master of which has disappeared. Still, it’s kept open, it continues an existence exactly as if he were there. It’s like an old letter, a suite in which an heiress has died.
Read more at location 2084
He looks black as an Egyptian. When he smiles his teeth seem to leap out of his sunburned face.
Read more at location 2132
sure she could read what we have done in my face. I am ready to confess it all, I haven’t the slightest instinct to escape or he, but Dean, ah, he would greet her with a smile. The whole difference lies in that. I am not strong enough to love her. One must be selfish.
Read more at location 2189
Afterwards they lie for a long time in silence. There is nothing. Their poem is scattered about them. The days have fallen everywhere, they have collapsed like cards. The air has a chill in it. He pulls the covers up. She is so perfectly still she seems asleep. He touches her face. It is wet with tears.
Read more at location 2246
…there is nothing that is not yours, all I think, all I am able to feel. I am embarrassed only that I do not know enough. But I don’t care if you never belong to me, I only want to belong to you, just be hard with me, strict, but don’t leave, just do like if you were with another girl–Please. I will die otherwise. I understand now that we can die of love.
Read more at location 2339
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