Top 80 John Knowles Quotes
#1. What makes you so special? Why should you get it and all the rest of us be in the dark?"
The momentum of the argument abruptly broke from his control. His face froze. "Because I've suffered," he burst out.
John Knowles
#2. Is he using terror to keep away boredom? Does he have to try to destroy something? Even as a last resort, himself?
John Knowles
#3. From my locker I collected my sneakers, jock strap, and gym pants and then turned away, leaving the door ajar for the first time, forlornly open and abandoned, the locker unlocked. This was more final than the moment when the Headmaster handed me my diploma. My schooling was over now.
John Knowles
#4. 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 or enlist or both, but we stayed dutifully at our desks doing tomorrow's homework.
John Knowles
#5. 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.
John Knowles
#6. There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding
John Knowles
#7. Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.
John Knowles
#8. 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.
John Knowles
#9. I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.
John Knowles
#10. He was nodding his head, his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. I believe you. It's okay because I understand and I believe you. You've already shown me and I believe you.
John Knowles
#11. He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.
John Knowles
#12. The first person who says anything unpleasant will get a swift kick in the ass.
John Knowles
#13. It also meant mornings of glory such as this one, in which the snow, white almost to blueness, lay like a soft comforter over the hills, and birches and pines indestructibly held their ground, rigid lines against the snow and sky, very thin and very strong like Vermonters.
John Knowles
#15. Sixteen is the key and crucial and natural age for a human being to be, and people of all other ages are ranged in an orderly manner ahead of and behind you as a harmonious setting for the sixteen-year-olds of this world.
John Knowles
#16. I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.
John Knowles
#17. In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day i entered it, was vibrantly real while i was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left
John Knowles
#18. Life is fighting. In life, it's the look ahead that counts. We are all born equally far from the sun. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.
John Knowles
#19. 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 loved.
John Knowles
#20. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.
John Knowles
#21. Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.
John Knowles
#22. Why talk about something you can't do anything about?
John Knowles
#23. Well, it's a useful room." "Yes, I guess it's useful, all right.
John Knowles
#24. What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.
John Knowles
#25. And sometimes you need too much to know the facts, and so humbly and stupidly you stay.
John Knowles
#26. So the more things stay the same, the more they change after all.
John Knowles
#28. Phineas didn't really dislike West Point in particular or authority in general, but just considered authority the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction, the backboard which returned all the insults he threw at it.
John Knowles
#29. Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.
John Knowles
#30. 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 of almost anyone else who ever attended the school.
John Knowles
#31. Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.
John Knowles
#32. You never waste your time. That's why I have to do it for you.
John Knowles
#33. All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.
John Knowles
#34. 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.
John Knowles
#35. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.
John Knowles
#36. His jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. I believe you. It's okay because I understand and I believe you.
John Knowles
#37. There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.
John Knowles
#38. There was a breath of widening life in the morning air
something hard to describe
John Knowles
#39. 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 place to go if you really wanted an education.
John Knowles
#40. 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.
John Knowles
#41. It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.
John Knowles
#42. Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.
John Knowles
#43. Let us pray. We all slumped immediately and unthinkingly in to the awkward crouch in which God was addressed.
John Knowles
#44. The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.
John Knowles
#45. 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 just for the moment.
John Knowles
#46. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.
John Knowles
#47. I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend's shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.
John Knowles
#48. Most of the students there, he said, don't know what they think. You tell 'em, they'll think it. I plan to tell 'em.
John Knowles
#49. Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half.
John Knowles
#50. There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them.
John Knowles
#51. The scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse
John Knowles
#52. I saw on the pad not an operator's number from my home town, but one which seemed to interrupt the beating of my heart.
John Knowles
#53. Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.
John Knowles
#54. So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.
John Knowles
#55. There are simply more young people than there ever were. You get this feeling of strength. Also, large numbers can be a drawback, making it difficult to lose one's anonymity.
John Knowles
#57. 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
John Knowles
#58. 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.
John Knowles
#60. He's imagining himself Justice incarnate, balancing the scales. He's forgotten that Justice incarnate is not only balancing the scales but also blindfolded.
John Knowles
#61. The next major advance in the health of the American people will be determined by what the individual is willing to do for himself.
John Knowles
#62. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
John Knowles
#63. As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.
John Knowles
#64. This is a school,' said Pete in his level voice. 'All views can be expressed and considered here. We're not indoctrinating you.'
Yes, well,' Hochschwender replied coolly, 'that's a matter of point of view.
John Knowles
#65. 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.
John Knowles
#66. 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 a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.
John Knowles
#67. It wasn't the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.
John Knowles
#68. Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.
John Knowles
#69. You can do more! A lot more. If you want a ... record you can be proud of, you'll do a heck of a lot more than just what you have to.
John Knowles
#70. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I have not been able to identify its presence.
John Knowles
#71. It is a sad day when one looks back and sees that his largest regrets have become some of the most integral elements of his dreams.
John Knowles
#72. I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything. I couldn't help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little
John Knowles
#73. Finny never permitted himself to realize that when you won they lost. That would have destroyed the perfect beauty which was sport.
John Knowles
#75. 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.
John Knowles
#76. 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.
John Knowles
#77. Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.
John Knowles
#78. I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn't make yourself over between dawn and dusk.
John Knowles
#79. Gene, on the desire to be Finny: I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.
John Knowles
#80. The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.
John Knowles
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
