Quotes from John Williams

Den intellektuelle borde inte bli tvingad att förstöra det som han ägnat sitt liv åt att bygga upp.

For an intsant he felt the truth of what he said, and for the first time in months he felt lift away from him the weight of a despair whose heaviness he had not fully realized. Nearly giddy, almost laughing, he said again, 'It really isn't important.

För den mänskliga rasen finns krig och nederlag och segrar som inte är militära och som inte nedtecknats i historien annaler. Kom ihåg det medan ni försöker besluta vad ni ska göra.

pag.36 You must remeber what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remeber that while tou're trying to decide what to do.

he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality.

it was a passion nether of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force tha comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive!

And it might be amusing to pass through the world once more before I return to the cloistered and slow extinction that awaits us all.

war doesn't merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that's left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.

Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, "Are you sure?" "I'm sure," Sloane said softly. "How can you tell? How can you be sure?" "It's love, Mr. Stoner," Sloane said cheerfully. "You are in love. It's as simple as that.

He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something—even pain—to pierce him, to bring him alive.

You are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky.

As if it were important, he strained his memory; beside the sofa there had been a large lamp with a round milk-white base encircled by a chain of painted roses, and beyond that, on the wall, neatly framed, was a series of water colors done by a forgotten aunt during her Grand Tour.

Hij begreep dat hij in die toekomst zou veranderen, maar hij zag de toekomst zelf als het instrument van verandering en niet als het doel ervan.

the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled.

Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment.

He felt his inadequacy to the goal he had so recklessly chosen and felt the attraction of the world he and abandoned. He grieved for his own loss...

Though they got along well enough together, they had not become close friends; they had no confidences and seldom saw each other outside their weekly gatherings.

Desde que tenía memoria, William Stoner había tenido obligaciones. A los seis años ordeñaba las vacas macilentas, alimentaba a los cerdos en el chiquero que estaba a pocos metros de la casa y juntaba

He felt at times that he was kind of a vegetable and he longed for something--even pain-- to pierce him, to bring him alive.

It takes being in love to learn something about yourself.

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.

He conceived himself changed in that future, but he saw the future itself as the instrument of change rather than its object.

That was on a Tuesday, and for the next two days the manuscript lay untouched on his desk. For reasons that he did not fully understand, he could not bring himself to open the folder, to begin the reading which a few months before would have been a duty of pleasure. He watched it warily, as if it were an enemy that was trying to entice him again into a war that he had renounced.