John Knowles Quotes & Sayings

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

The first person who says anything unpleasant will get a swift kick in the ass. — John Knowles

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 they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way. — John Knowles

Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half. — John Knowles

There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them. — John Knowles

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

My misery was too deep to speak any more. I scanned the page; I was having trouble breathing, as though the oxygen were leaving the room. Amid its devastation my mind flashed from thought to thought, despairingly in search of something left which it could rely on. Not rely on absolutely, that was obliterated as a possibility, just rely on a little,some solace, something surviving in the ruin. — John Knowles

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

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

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

I jounced the limb. — John Knowles

Let us pray. We all slumped immediately and unthinkingly in to the awkward crouch in which God was addressed. — John Knowles

But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth. — John Knowles

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

So the more things stay the same, the more they change after all. — John Knowles

It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature. — John Knowles

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

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

Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence. — John Knowles

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 to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this. — John Knowles

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

And sometimes you need too much to know the facts, and so humbly and stupidly you stay. — John Knowles

Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak. — John Knowles

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

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

There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding — John Knowles

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

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

The beach was hours away by bicycle, forbidden, completely out of all bounds. Going there risked expulsion, destroyed the studying I was going to do for an important test the next morning, blasted the reasonable amount of order I wanted to maintain in my life, and it also involved the kind of long, labored bicycle ride I hated. "All right," I said. We got our bikes and slipped away from Devon along a back road. Having invited me Finny now felt he had to keep me entertained. He told long, wild stories about his childhood; as I pumped panting up steep hills he glided along beside me, joking steadily. He analyzed my character, and he insisted on knowing what I disliked most about him ("You're too conventional," I said). — John Knowles

But Brinker came in. I think he made a point of visiting all the rooms near him the first day. "Well, Gene," his beaming face appeared around the door. Brinker looked the standard preparatory school article in his gray gabardine suit with square, hand-sewn-looking jacket pockets, a conservative necktie, and dark brown cordovan shoes. His face was all straight lines - eyebrows, mouth, nose, everything - and he carried his six feet of height straight as well. He looked but happened not to be athletic, being too busy with politics, arrangements, and offices. There was nothing idiosyncratic about Brinker unless you saw him from behind; I did as he turned to close the door after him. The flaps of his gabardine jacket parted slightly over his healthy rump, and it is that, without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker's salient characteristic, those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks. — John Knowles

There was a breath of widening life in the morning air
something hard to describe
— John Knowles

As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck. — John Knowles

I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it. — John Knowles

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

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

The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life. — John Knowles

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

Someone knocked me down; I pushed Brinker over a small slope; someone was trying to tackle me from behind. Everywhere there was the smell of vitality in clothes, the vital something in wool and flannel and corduroy which spring releases. I had forgotten that this existed, this smell which instead of the first robin, or the first bud or leaf, means to me that spring has come. I had always welcomed vitality and energy and warmth radiating from thick and sturdy winter clothes. It made me happy, but I kept wondering about next spring, about whether khaki, or suntans or whatever the uniform of the season was, had this aura of promise in it. I felt fairly sure it didn't. — John Knowles

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

Like all old, good schools, Devon did not stand isolated behind walls and gates but emerged naturally from the town which had produced it. So there was no sudden moment of encounter as I approached it; the houses along Gilman Street began to look more defensive, which meant that I was near the school, and then more exhausted, which meant that I was in it. — John Knowles

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

Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come. — John Knowles

Must like the rest of us on the surface, he had an underlying obliging and considerate strain which barred him from being a really important member of the class. You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with "personality," and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas. — John Knowles

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. — John Knowles

Is he using terror to keep away boredom? Does he have to try to destroy something? Even as a last resort, himself? — John Knowles

Then for no reason at all, I felt magnificent. It was as though my body until that instant had simply been lazy as though the aches and exhaustion were all imagined, created from nothing in order to keep me from truly exerting myself. Now my body seemed at last to say, "Well, if you must have it, here!" and an accession of strength came flooding through me. Buoyed up, I forgot my usual feeling of routine self-pity when working out, I lost myself, oppressed mind along with aching body; all entanglements were shed, I broke into the clear. — John Knowles

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

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

I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend's shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents. — John Knowles

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

There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream. — John Knowles

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why talk about something you can't do anything about? — John Knowles

Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves. — John Knowles

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

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

The war was and is reality for me. — John Knowles

What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me. — John Knowles

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

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

Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I have not been able to identify its presence. — John Knowles

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

I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case. — John Knowles

Sarcasm is the protest of the weak. — John Knowles

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

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

Everyone contributed to this legend except Phineas. At the outset, with the attempt on Hitler's life, Finny had said, "If someone gave Leper a loaded gun and put it at Hitler's temple, he'd miss." There was a general shout of outrage, and then we recommended the building of Leper's triumphal arch around Brinker's keystone. Phineas took no part in it, and since little else was talked about in the Butt Room he soon stopped going there and stopped me from going as well - "How do you expect to be an athlete if you smoke like a forest fire?" He drew me increasingly away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all other friends, into a world inhabited by just himself and me, where there was no war at all, just Phineas and me alone among all the people of the world, training for the Olympics of 1944. — John Knowles

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

You never waste your time. That's why I have to do it for you. — John Knowles

Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God. — John Knowles

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

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

Last night as your breathing
settled into sleep
what I heard was the half-forgotten sound,
the velvet rush and hiss,
the automatic click
as the record player's arm runs out,
is brushed away
at the record's centre,
the pulse of its subsiding
oddly comforting.
33 1/3 rpm.
The knowledge that when the music ends,
there will not be silence. — John Knowles

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever. — John Knowles

The scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse — John Knowles

The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary with age, enfeebled, dry. So more the things remain the same, the more they change after all. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed, I headed back though the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come out of the rain. — John Knowles

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

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

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

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

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. — John Knowles

I think we reminded them of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen. We were registered with no draft board, we had taken no physical examinations. No one had ever tested us for hernia or color blindness. Trick knees and punctured eardrums were minor complaints and not yet disabilities which would separate a few from the fate of the rest. We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve. Anyway, they were more indulgent toward us than at any other time; they snapped at the heels of seniors, driving and molding and arming them for the war. They noticed our games tolerantly. We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction. — John Knowles

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

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

Well, it's a useful room." "Yes, I guess it's useful, all right. — John Knowles

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

...moved by his own sermon. — John Knowles

Finny never permitted himself to realize that when you won they lost. That would have destroyed the perfect beauty which was sport. — John Knowles

The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward. — John Knowles

As I had to do whenever I glimpsed this river, I thought of Phineas. Not of the tree and pain, but of one of his favorite tricks, Phineas in exaltation, balancing on one foot on the prow of a canoe like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured, body a complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all the others to maintain this supreme fantasy of achievement, his skin glowing from immersions, his whole body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might by gently pushing upward with his foot glide a little way higher and remain suspended in space, encompassing all the glory of the summer and offering it to the sky. — John Knowles

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

We are all born equally far from the sun. — John Knowles

Now here it was after all, preserved by some considerate hand with varnisch and wax. Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn't even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the abscence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify it's presence.
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.
I felt fear's echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompanient and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky — John Knowles