Best John Knowles Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are all born equally far from the sun. — 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

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

The war was and is reality for me. — 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

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

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

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