John Knowles Quotes

42 quotes in 612 categories

• Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.
• 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.
• Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.
• Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
• It was hard to remember in the heavy and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted…
• 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…
• I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.
• Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half" was the first one I encountered. Another was, "Always…
• But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.
• There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding
• As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.
• So the more things stay the same, the more they change after all.
• 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…
• I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.
• I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on…
• Exeter was, I suspect, more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives…
• My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the…
• The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.
• The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.
• Looking back, I think we were all quite mature, surprisingly responsible. In earlier wars, boys of our age had just gone off to raise hell…

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