John Knowles Quotes (32 Quotes)

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart

It was hard to remember in the heavy and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.

Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.

Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.

This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way.

All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.

But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn't make yourself over between dawn and dusk.

I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.

I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

If we could get some grant money, it would ease the burden on the taxpayers of Philipsburg,

An abscess on his leg developed and he was in so much pain.

The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.

In high school football, things happen. For them, I'm sure it was a big disappointment. For us, we got a first down in that situation and it helped us. We felt good coming out of halftime and knew that if we stayed with the game plan, the kids would come

Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.

As a kid from a border state, I found the New Hampshire winter breathtakingly cold - for a while I didn't think I could breathe there at all - but I survived to return for the summer session of 1943.

We really did have a club whose members jumped from the branch of a very high tree into the river as initiation.

There's been a lot of misinformation out there. I think they're leaving a lot of people high and dry at very short notice.

The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.

Swimming isn't the most thrilling sport in the world, far from it it's a damn bore most of the time, but it does make you healthy and gives you a good body. I finished first as the anchor man in the final, decisive relay against Andover, to become an athletic mini-hero for about 15 minutes.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

Exeter was, I suspect, more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives of almost anyone else who ever attended the school.

Well, you know, there was the most enormous youth rebellion during the '30s. There was the Peace Pledge Union, which supposedly involved the cream of British youth. They thought wars were ridiculous and said just what everybody says today. They said they would not fight in any war.

My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.

There are simply more young people than there ever were. You get this feeling of strength. Also, large numbers can be a drawback, making it difficult to lose one's anonymity.

I like the way we came back, ... Give credit to Shippensburg, those kids played hard. Their secondary was great I thought we'd be able to throw more on them.

Looking back, I think we were all quite mature, surprisingly responsible. In earlier wars, boys of our age had just gone off to raise hell or enlist or both, but we stayed dutifully at our desks doing tomorrow's homework.