John Thorndike

“Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one's own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“It was all leaving her in slow, imperceptible movements, like the tide when one's back is turned: everyone, everything she had known. So all of grief and happiness, far from being buried with one, vanished beforehand except for scattered pieces. She lived among forgotten episodes, unknown faces bereft of names, closed off from the very world she had created; that was how it came to be. But I must show nothing of that, she thought. Her children---she must not reveal it to them.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“Gertrude Stein, when asked why she wrote, replied "For praise." Lorca said he wrote to be loved. Faulkner said a writer wrote for glory. I may at times have written for those reasons, it's hard to know. Overall I write because I see the world in a certain way that no dialogue or series of them can begin to describe, that no book can fully render, though the greatest books thrill in their attempt.
A great book may be an accident, but a good one is a possibility, and it is thinking of that that one writes. In short, to achieve. The rest takes care of itself, and so much praise is given to insignificant things that there is hardly any sense in striving for it.
In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe.”
― James Salter, Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter

“She has to leave. She has nowhere to go. She imagines tying Rich to a chair, his hands and feet bound and his neck roped. No food, no water, no escape until he tells her everything he’s felt about her for the last four years, the whole truth until she believes him. If he talks and she knows he’s lying, she’ll wrap another coil around his neck, each one tighter than the last. Finally he’ll break down and tell her the bitter truth—that he never loved her at all, that it was only their play that excited him.”
― John Thorndike, The World Against Her Skin