Quotes from John Williams

The coroner announced heart failure as the cause of death, but William Stoner always felt that in a moment of anger and despair Sloane had willed his heart to cease, as if in a last mute gesture of love and contempt for a world that had betrayed him so profoundly that he could not endure in it.

Begone, begone, you bloody whoreson Gauls!

From the marriage had come only one child; he had wanted a son and had got a girl, and that was another disappointment he hardly bothered to conceal.

U ?etrdeset tre?oj godini života William Stoner nau?io je ono što su drugi, mnogo mla?i, nau?ili prije njega: da osoba koju zavoliš u prvom trenutku nije osoba koju voliš na kraju i da ljubav nije svršetak puta, nego proces u kojem jedna osoba nastoji upoznati drugu.

Stoner said to Finch, "I have no wish to retire before I have to, merely to accommodate a whim of Professor Lomax.

Mata algo en la gente, algo que no puede recobrarse

he said no more and hoped that his silence was less compromising than were his explanations.

A tientas, confusos, se tocaron, se enredaron en un abrazo torpe y tenso y durante largo rato permanecieron sentados juntos sin moverse, como si cualquier movimiento pudiese dejar escapar de ellos la cosa extraña y terrible que agarraban con las manos.

Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed.

The iconoclasm need not be loud and messy, I can almost hear him saying

Edith smiled at him with a curious mixture of fondness and contempt.

he saw the thin wrists that protruded inches out of his coat sleeves; and he wondered if he appeared as ludicrous to others as he did to himself.

It's love, Mr. Stoner," Sloane said cheerfully. "You are in love. It's as simple as that.

He saw the sickness of the world and of his own country, during the years after the great war; he saw hatred and suspicion become a kind of madness that swept across the land like a swift plague; he saw young men go again to war marching eagerly to a senseless doom, as if in the echo of a nightmare. STONER

She had got the habit of silence; and though she reserved a shy, soft smile for her father, she would not talk to him.

Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment. She was an only child, and loneliness was one of the earliest conditions of her life.

Edith's was a campaign waged with such cleverness and skill that he could find no rational grounds for complaint.

He seldom thought of the past or the future, or of the disappointments and joys of either; he concentrated all his energies of which he was capable upon the moment of his work and hoped that he was at last defined by what he did.

Edith's strategy became more indirect, more quiet and contained.

It was a strategy that disguised itself as love and concern, and thus one against which he was helpless.

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The

Se un libro cambia è soltanto perché siamo cambiati noi e lo affrontiamo in modo diverso.

I've never wanted to admit it to myself," he said with something like tranquillity, "but you really do hate me, don't you, Edith?

È per noi che esiste l'università, per i diseredati del mondo. Non per gli studenti, non per la disinteressata ricerca della conoscenza, né per le altre ragioni che sentite dire. Quelle sono solo una copertura, come quei pochi individui normali, idonei al mondo, che di tanto in tanto accogliamo tra noi. Ma è tutto fumo negli occhi.