Quotes from John Knowles

Phineas just walked serenely on, or rather flowed on, rolling forward in his white sneakers with such unthinking unity of movement that walk didn't describe it.

I believe you. It's okay because I understand and I believe you. You've already shown me and I believe you.

There was no latent snobbery in us; we didn't find any in them. It was only that we could feel a deep and sincere difference between us and them, a difference which everyone struggled with awkward fortitude to bridge.

I could never agree with either of them. It would have been comfortable, but I could not believe it. 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.

Because it was what you had in your heart that counted.

The winter loves me," he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, "I mean as much as you can say a season can 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 went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.

Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half.

You know what? I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn't it, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive.

The Master was slipping from his official position momentarily, and it was just possible, if Phineas pressed hard enough, that there might be a flow of simple, unregulated friendliness between them, and such flows were one of Finny's reasons for living.

Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence.

This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way.

Well, it's a useful room." "Yes, I guess it's useful, all right.

Dr. Stanpole's car was at the top of it, headlights on and motor running, empty. I idly considered stealing it, in the way that people idly consider many crimes it would be possible for them to commit.

Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with good clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

It is the beauty of small areas of order — a large heard, a group of trees, three similar dormitories, a circle of old houses — living together in contentious harmony

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all- plus c'est la meme, plus ca change.

Last night as your breathing settled into sleep what I heard was the half-forgotten sound, the velvet rush and hiss, the automatic click as the record player's arm runs out, is brushed away at the record's centre, the pulse of its subsiding oddly comforting. 33 1/3 rpm. The knowledge that when the music ends, there will not be silence.

Like all old, good schools, Devon did not stand isolated behind walls and gates but emerged naturally from the town which had produced it. So there was no sudden moment of encounter as I approached it; the houses along Gilman Street began to look more defensive, which meant that I was near the school, and then more exhausted, which meant that I was in it.

because when you come right down to it the school is involved in everything that happens in the war, its all the same war and the same world...

We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve.

moved by his own sermon.

They too seemed permanent and never-changing, an untouched unreachable world high in space...

It was as though they felt it was especially unfair that it should strike one of the sixteen-year-olds, one of the few young men who could be free and happy in the summer of 1942.