Top 73 John Edward Williams Quotes
#1. You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.
John Edward Williams
#2. Mrs. Bostwick's face was heavy and lethargic, without any strength or delicacy, and it bore the deep marks of what must have been a habitual dissatisfaction.
John Edward Williams
#3. For my friends do not desert me, and life stays; for those two things I must be grateful.
John Edward Williams
#4. No, sir, Stoner said, and the decisiveness of his voice surprised him. He thought with some wonder of the decision he had suddenly made.
John Edward Williams
#5. From the marriage had come only one child; he had wanted a son and had got a girl, and that was another disappointment he hardly bothered to conceal.
John Edward Williams
#7. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them; and since the embodiment came before the recognition of the truth, it seemed a discovery that belonged to them alone.
John Edward Williams
#8. While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.
John Edward Williams
#9. One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one's acts; one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences.
John Edward Williams
#10. John Williams is best known for his novels, Nothing But the Night, Stoner, Butcher's Crossing, and Augustus, for which he won the National Book Award in 1973.
John Edward Williams
#11. And so, like many others, their honeymoon was a failure; yet they would not admit this to themselves, and they did not realize the significance of the failure until long afterward.
John Edward Williams
#12. Indeed, all of our past education will in some ways hinder us; for our habits of thinking about the nature of experience have determined our own expectations as radically as the habits of medieval man determined his.
John Edward Williams
#13. Rather awkwardly shy and therefore at times defensive and rather too assertive
John Edward Williams
#15. He listened to his words fall as if from the mouth of another, and watched his father's face, which received those words as a stone receives the repeated blows of a fist.
John Edward Williams
#16. Beneath his awe, he had a sudden sense of security and serenity he had never felt before.
John Edward Williams
#17. As if it were important, he strained his memory; beside the sofa there had been a large lamp with a round milk-white base encircled by a chain of painted roses, and beyond that, on the wall, neatly framed, was a series of water colors done by a forgotten aunt during her Grand Tour. But
John Edward Williams
#18. And it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment.
John Edward Williams
#19. His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure.
John Edward Williams
#20. A WEEK BEFORE commencement, at which Stoner was to receive his doctorate, Archer Sloane offered him a full-time instructorship at the University.
John Edward Williams
#22. Looking at her, Stoner was assailed by a consciousness of his own heavy clumsiness.
John Edward Williams
#23. William Stoner felt a kinship that he had not suspected; he knew that Lomax had gone through a kind of conversion, an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words,
John Edward Williams
#24. When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh.
John Edward Williams
#25. To care not for one's self is of little moment, but to care not for those whom one has loved is another matter.
John Edward Williams
#26. He felt a renewal of the old passion for study and learning; and with the curious and disembodied vigor of the scholar that is the condition of neither youth nor age, he returned to the only life that had not betrayed him. He discovered that he had not gone far from that life even in his despair.
John Edward Williams
#27. She turned to him and pulled her lips in what he knew must be a smile. Not at all. I'm having a lovely time. Really.
John Edward Williams
#28. He thought of the years before, the distant years with his parents on the farm, and of the deadness from which he had been miraculously revived.
John Edward Williams
#30. Finch turned to the other men and without raising his voice managed to call out to them.
John Edward Williams
#31. It is fortunate that youth never recognizes its ignorance, for if it did it would not find the courage to get the habit of endurance. It is perhaps an instinct of the blood and flesh which prevents this knowledge and allows the boy to become the man who will live to see the folly of his existence.
John Edward Williams
#32. Innocent of fashion or custom, they came to their studies as Stoner had dreamed that a student might
as if those studies were life itself and not specific means to specific ends.
John Edward Williams
#33. Sloane looked at him for a moment, his eyes bright and intent as they had been before the war. Then the film of indifference settled over them, and he turned away from Stoner and shuffled some papers on his desk.
John Edward Williams
#34. Between the brutality that would sacrifice a single innocent life to a fear without a name, and the enlightenment that would sacrifice thousands of lives to a fear that we have named, I have found little to choose.
John Edward Williams
#35. He did his work at the University as he did his work on the farm - thoroughly, conscientiously, with neither pleasure nor distress.
John Edward Williams
#36. But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain.
John Edward Williams
#37. Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.
John Edward Williams
#38. Will still support my weight, but it drags beneath me uselessly; and when I prick it with my stylus, there is the merest ghost of a pain. I still have not informed
John Edward Williams
#39. He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.
John Edward Williams
#40. 681Nor do you escape, my friend.No, indeed.You,too,are among the infirm- you are the dreamer,the madman in a madder world( ... )You're bright enough- ( ... ) But you have the taint,the old infirmity. You think there's something here,something to find. Well in the world,you'd learn soon enough.
John Edward Williams
#41. She has always seemed to me the epitome of womankind: coldly suspicious, politely ill-tempered, and narrowly selfish.
John Edward Williams
#42. He was our enemy, but as it is strange, after so many years the death of an old enemy is like the death of an old friend.
John Edward Williams
#43. In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense.
John Edward Williams
#44. When at last he came to his decision, it seemed to him that he had known all along what it would be.
John Edward Williams
#46. Perhaps you were right after all, my dear Nicolaus; perhaps there is but one god. But if that is true, you have misnamed him. He is Accident, and his priest is man, and that priest's only victim must be at last himself, his poor divided self.
John Edward Williams
#47. The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.
John Edward Williams
#49. Deliberately, as if committing himself to something, he stepped forward and walked down the path to the porch and knocked on the front door.
John Edward Williams
#50. For a few moments in the evening, then, they talked quietly and casually, as if they were old friends or exhausted enemies.
John Edward Williams
#51. Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.
John Edward Williams
#52. So we are of the world, after all; we should have known that. We did know it, I believe; but we had to withdraw a little, pretend a little, so that we could -
John Edward Williams
#53. But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.
John Edward Williams
#55. The instructor was a man of middle age, in his early fifties; his name was Archer Sloane, and he came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf so profound that he would make no effort to close it.
John Edward Williams
#56. Oh, how proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason to be improper! It takes being in love to know something about yourself. Sometimes, with you, I feel like the slut of the world, the eager, faithful slut of the world. Does that seem proper to you?
John Edward Williams
#57. The people moved sluggishly through the warmth, and he moved with them, conscious of his height among the seated figures, nodding to the faces he now recognized.
John Edward Williams
#58. Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance.
John Edward Williams
#59. That is the very best time of life, he thought again: when you are very young, when living is a simple, perfect succession of golden days.
John Edward Williams
#60. Lust and learning," Katherine once said. "That's really all there is, isn't it?
John Edward Williams
#61. She was,as she had said, almost happy with her despair, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.
John Edward Williams
#62. Her life was invariable, like a low hum; and it was watched over by her mother, who, when Edith was a child, would sit for hours watching her paint her pictures or play her piano, as if no other occupation were possible for either of them.
John Edward Williams
#64. But there is much that cannot go into books, and that is the loss with which I become increasingly concerned.
John Edward Williams
#65. The strongest of us are but the puniest weaklings, are but tinkling cymbals and sounding brass, before the eternal mystery.
John Edward Williams
#66. Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.
John Edward Williams
#68. He felt the logic of grammar, and he thought he perceived how it spread out from itself, permeating the language and supporting human thought.
John Edward Williams
#69. They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other.
John Edward Williams
#70. Stoner said to Finch, I have no wish to retire before I have to, merely to accommodate a whim of Professor Lomax.
John Edward Williams
#71. In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.
John Edward Williams
#72. Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve.
John Edward Williams
#73. He looked at them curiously, as if he had not seen them before, and felt very distant from them and very close to them.
John Edward Williams
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