Quotes from John Williams

coming home early only when his loneliness for a brief glimpse of his daughter, or a word with her, made it impossible for him to stay away.

We really haven't known each other very well these last few years, have we?" She looked away and said uncomfortably, "Well—I suppose not.

La voce era secca e monocorde e gli usciva dalle labbra quasi immobili, senza espressione o intonazione, mentre le sue lunghe dita sottili si muovevano con grazia e decisione, come per restituire alle parole quella forma che la voce non riusciva a dargli.

could think of his daughter only as a very small girl who had once sat beside him in a distant room and looked at him with solemn delight, as a lovely child who long ago had died.

the bitter attrition of feeling and care.

The barbarian waits, and we grow weaker in the security of our ease and pleasure.

Bisogna innamorarsi per capire un po' come si è fatti.

of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

So I must be locked up, where I can be safely irresponsible, where I can do no harm.

So the bed that had been the arena of their passion became the support of her illness.

It occurred to him that he had never before known the body of another; and it occurred to him further that that was the reason he had always somehow separated the self of another from the body that carried that self around. And it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment.

I was dealing with governance in both instances, and individual responsibilities, and enmities and friendship. In a university, professors and others are always vying for power, and there's really no power there. If you have any power at all, it's a nothing. It's really odd that these things should happen in a university but they do. Except in scale, the machinations for power are about the same in a university as in the Roman Empire or Washington.

They walked with some purpose, yet without particular hurry

He spoke more confidently and felt a warm hard severity gather within him. He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be.

I am sure that you have had, as we all have, that mysterious experience of prescience--a moment when, beyond reason and cause, at a word, or a flicker of an eyelid, or at anything at all, one has a sudden foreboding--of what,one does not know,. I am not a religious man; but sometimes I am nearly tempted to believe that the gods do speak to us, and that only in unguarded moments do we listen.

Perladas por la luz de la luna, desnudas y puras, para él representaban, según le parecía, el modo de vida que había adoptado, tal como un templo representa un dios.

he regarded the automobile speculatively and coolly, as if it were the future.

He was drained of feeling, and he felt very old and tired.

Carefully, with his eyes squinted, with the light glistening upon his fair skin and thinning blond hair, like a chemist measuring a rare substance, he poured the beer from the bottles into glasses.

love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

For my friends do not desert me, and life stays; for those two things I must be grateful.

Though he remembered the authors and their works and their dates and

One evening, near the end of the time they had together, Katherine said quietly, almost absently, "Bill, if we never have anything else, we will have had this week. Does that sound like a girlish thing to say?" "It doesn't matter what it sounds like," Stoner said. He nodded. "It's true." "Then I'll say it," Katherine said. "We will have had this week.

She seemed happiest when she was alone; she would sit for hours working needlepoint or embroidering tablecloths and napkins, with a tiny indrawn smile on her lips.