Quotes from John Williams

Perhaps you were right after all, my dear Nicolaus; perhaps there is but one god. But if that is true, you have misnamed him. He is Accident, and his priest is man, and that priest's only victim must be at last himself, his poor divided self.

writes within it, is erudite, stately, illuminating. The iconoclasm need not be loud and messy, I can almost hear him saying

I am the son of Julius Caesar, and I am consul of Rome. You will not call me boy again.

In seinem dreiundvierzigsten Jahr erfuhr William Stoner, was andere, oft weit jüngere Menschen vor ihm erfahren hatten: dass nämlich jene Person, die man zu Beginn liebt, nicht jene Person ist, die man am Ende liebt, und dass Liebe kein Ziel, sondern der Beginn eines Prozesses ist, durch den ein Mensch versucht, einen anderen kennenzulernen.

The poets say that youth is the day of the fevered blood, the hour of love, the moment of passion; and that with age comes the cooling baths of wisdom, whereby the fever is cured. The poets are wrong. I did not know love until late in my life, when I could no longer grasp it. Youth is ignorant, and its passion is abstract.

Nearly every afternoon, when his classes were over, he came to her apartment. They made love, and talked, and made love again, like children who did not think of tiring at their play. The spring days lengthened, and they looked forward to the summer.

A 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.' He paused for a long moment; then he smiled slightly. 'The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has signed his life to build.

It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that's just protective coloration.

He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.

She has always seemed to me the epitome of womankind: coldly suspicious, politely ill-tempered, and narrowly selfish.

During that decade when many men's faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy.

Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.

When he held it in his hands his fingers seemed to come alive; they trembled so that he could scarcely open it. He turned the first few pages and saw the dedication: "To W.S.

Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life.

It was a world of half-light in which they lived and to which they brought the better parts of themselves--so that, after a while, the outer world where people walked and spoke, where there was change and continual movement, seemed to them false and unreal. Their lives were sharply divided between the two worlds, and it seemed to them natural that they should live so divided.

The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape.

A new tranquillity had come between them. It was a quietness that was like the beginning of love; and almost without thinking, Stoner knew why it had come. They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.

Una guerra non solo uccide qualche migliaio, o qualche centinaio di migliaia di giovani. Uccide anche qualcosa dentro le persone, qualcosa che non si può più recuperare. E quando una persona attraversa molte guerre, ben presto si riduce come un bruto, come quella stessa creatura che noi - lei e io, e tutti quelli come noi - abbiamo sollevato dal fango.

Gyvenimas, lyg margaspalvio stiklo skliautas, D?m?ja balt? amžinyb?s švies?, Kol šuk?m krenta trypiamas Mirties.

How do you oppose a foe who is wholly irrational and unpredictable—and yet who, out of animal energy and the accident of circumstance, has attained a most frightening power?

It's not that they were worth anything. But they were mine.

For a people may endure an almost incredible series of the darkest failures without breaking; but give them respite and some hope for the future, and they may not endure an unexpected denial of that hope.

My uncle once told me to read the poets, to love them, and to use them—but never to trust them.

its flatness, and its yellow-greenness, its high walls of mountain wooded with the deep green of pine in which ran the flaming red-gold of turning aspen, its jutting rock and hillock, all roofed with the intense blue of the airless sky—it seemed to him that the contours of the place flowed beneath his eyes, that his very gaze shaped what he saw, and in turn gave his own existence form and place.