"In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of……" — John Edward Williams
"In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."
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John Edward Williams
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9 Quotes by John Edward Williams
John Edward Williams has 9 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of…
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To read without joy is stupid.
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In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather,…
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A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something…
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In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves…
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The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange,…
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It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that…
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You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are…
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More Absolute Quotes
This quote is filed under Absolute Quotes,
one of 1,809 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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I love things that age well - things that don't date, that stand the test of time and that become…
— Giorgio Armani
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Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
— Lord Acton
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A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity,…
— Mikhail Bakunin
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But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and…
— Mikhail Bakunin
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Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
— Henry Adams
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What may seem depressing or even tragic to one person may seem like an absolute scream to another person, especially…
— Dave Barry
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No sex, age, or condition is above or below the absolute necessity of modesty; but without it one vastly beneath…
— Bruce Barton
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Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point…
— Simone de Beauvoir
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It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas…
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The truth, the absolute truth, is that the chief beauty for the theatre consists in fine bodily proportions.
— Sarah Bernhardt
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The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
— Aneurin Bevan
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Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
— Theodor Adorno
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