Quotes from John Williams

How contrary an animal is man, who most treasures what he refuses or abandons! ("Augustus")

For I have returned to that learning which I abandoned many years ago, and it is likely that I should not have done so had not I been condemned to this loneliness; I sometimes can almost believe that the world in seeking to punish me has done me a service it cannot imagine.

Her eyes were upon him as if she had no interest in what she was saying.

When one has had power in his grasp, and has failed to hold it, and has remained alive—what does one become?

This came to be a ritual, more and more meaningless as it was repeated, but a ritual which nevertheless gave his life the only shape it now had.

But for a little while," Francine said, "you will be here;

What does become of people who slip quietly out of your life?

The way to knowledge is a long journey, and the goal is distant; and one must visit many places along the way, if he is to know that goal when he arrives at it.

John Williams's intense scrutiny of this romantic tale, this unquestioned gloss of the manic energies underlying westward expansion, manifest destiny, the "American spirit" and its projection of an individualism which could only be sought and found in the wild open spaces of the American Frontier.

He is Accident, and his priest is man, and that priest's only victim must be at last himself, his poor divided self.

You spend nearly a year of your life and sweat, because you have faith in the dream of a fool. And what have you got? Nothing.

And it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult.

betrayed by certain artificialities of conduct, thrust from a great mechanical world upon this bare plateau of existence that fronted the wilderness.

He is a man like any other… he will become what he will become, out of the force of his person and the accident of his fate.

You mustn't give it up," he said, and his voice took on an urgency that he could not understand. "No matter how hard it will seem sometimes, you mustn't give it up. It's too good for you to give it up. Oh, it's good, there's no doubt of it.

He was silent for a long time as he looked from face to face. He heard his voice issue flatly. "I have taught..." he said. He began again. "I have taught at this University for nearly forty years. I do not know what I would have done if I had not been a teacher. If I had not taught, I might have-" He paused, as if distracted. Then he said, with a finality, "I want to thank you all for letting me teach.

un etica che gli imponeva di offrire al mondo tiranno visi sempre inespressivi, rigidi e spenti.

Liefde is geen eindpunt, maar een proces, waarin de een probeert de ander te leren kennen.

But before [William Stoner] the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration. He saw it as the great University library, to which new wings might be built, to which new books might be added and from which old ones might be withdrawn, while its true nature remained essentially unchanged.

A 43 anni compiuti, William Stoner apprese quello che altri,..., avevano imparato prima: che la persona che amiamo da subito non è quella che amiamo per davvero e che l'amore non è una fine ma un processo attraverso il quale una persona tenta di conoscerne un'altra

He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

The True, the Good, the Beautiful. "[...] They're just around the corner, in the next corridor; they're in the next book, the one you haven't read, or in the next stack, the one you haven't got to. But you'll get to it someday. And when you do--when you do--

The True, the Good, the Beautiful. They're just around the corner, in the next corridor; they're in the next book, the one you haven't read, or in the next stack, the one you haven't got to. But you'll get to it someday. And when you do--when you do--