Quotes from John Knowles

No one cared, no one exercised any real discipline over us; we were on our own.

I didn't know why he had chosen me, why it was only to me that he could show the most humbling sides of his handicap. I didn't care. For the war was no longer eroding the peaceful summertime stillness I had prized so much at Devon, and although the playing fields were crusted under a foot of congealed snow and the river was now a hard gray-white lane of ice between gaunt trees, peace had come back to Devon for me.

I felt better. Yes, I sensed it like the sweat of relief when nausea passes away; I felt better. We were even after all, even in enmity. The deadly rivalry was on both sides after all.

Me?' He smiled faintly. 'Listen, I could study forever and I'd never break a C. But it's different for you, you're good. You really are. If I had a brain like that, I'd-I'd have my head cut open so people could look at it'. 'Now wait a second. . .

The crew waits for no man.

My aid alone had never seemed to him in the category of help. The reason for this occurred to me as the procession moved slowly across the brilliant foyer to the doors; Phineas had thought of me as an extension of himself.

Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed

Wars were made by something ignorant in the human heart

Sentivo che non ero, non ero mai stato e non sarei mai stato una parte vivente di questo mondo straordinariamente solido e profondamente significativo che mi circonda.

uello che voglio dire è che io amo l'inverno, e quando ami qualcosa, ti ama indietro in qualsiasi modo debba amare.

Under the influence not I know of the hardest cider but of his own inner joy at life for a moment as it should be, as it was meant to be in his nature, Phineas recaptured that magic gift for existing primarily in space, one foot conceding briefly to gravity its rights before spinning him off again into the air. it was his wildest demonstration of himself, of himself in the kind of world he loved; it was his choreography of peace.

It wasn't the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had town from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.

I began at that point the emotional examination to note how far my convalescence had gone — I was taller, bigger generally in relation to these stairs, I had more money and success and "security" than in the days when specters seemed to go up and down with me.

There were several trees bleakly reaching into the fog. Any one of them might have been the one I was looking for.

Yet here was a scattered grove of trees, none of them of any particular grandeur.

Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft and stricken, since he was by nature someone who carried others. I didn't think he knew how to act or even how to feel as the object of help.

by means of certain small scars rising along its trunk, and by a limb extending over the river, and another thinner limb growing near it. 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...the old giants have become piggies while you were looking the other way.

When they torpedo the troopship," he shouted, " you can't stand around admiring the view. Jump!

You didn't shame anybody into anything." "Oh yes I did. I'm good for you that way. You have a tendency to back away from things otherwise.

considered authority, the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction...

I had to be right in never talking about what you could not change, and I had to make many people agree that I was right. None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or because they could not understand it. I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way.

There isn't any question that we are conforming in every possible way to everything that's happening and everything that's going to happen.

Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.

tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought