Quotes from John Knowles

The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart

Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved. And if it wasn't there, as for example with Phineas, then I put it there myself.

Life is fighting. In life, it's the look ahead that counts. We are all born equally far from the sun. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.

What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love. I didn't think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true.

Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.

He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.

You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it's the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment. Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over.

the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse

He was nodding his head, his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. "I believe you. It's okay because I understand and I believe you. You've already shown me and I believe you.

Finny never permitted himself to realize that when you won they lost. That would have destroyed the perfect beauty which was sport.

What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.

We are all born equally far from the sun.

There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding

You never waste your time. That's why I have to do it for you.

Why talk about something you can't do anything about?

In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day i entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.

You can do more! A lot more. If you want a...record you can be proud of, you'll do a heck of a lot more than just what you have to.

I jounced the limb.

Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.