John Knowles > Quotes

“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, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“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

“Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“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, A Stolen Past

“I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

“We are all born equally far from the sun.”
― John Knowles, A Stolen Past

“But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“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, A Separate Peace

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

“Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“When you love something it loves you back in whatever way it has to love.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Never say you are five feet nine when
you are five feet eight and a half" was the first one I encountered.
Another was, "Always say some prayers at night because it might turn
out that there is a God.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“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 jounced the limb.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“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, Peace Breaks Out

“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 turned with an inward groan to look at him. Quackenbush wasn't going to let me just do the work for him like the automaton I wished to be. We were going to have to be pitted against each other. It was easy enough now to see why. For Quackenbush had been systematically disliked since he first set foot in Devon, with careless, disinterested insults coming at him from the beginning, voting for and applauding the class leaders through years of attaining nothing he wanted for himself. I didn't want to add to his humiliations; I even sympathized with his trembling, goaded egotism he could no longer contain, the furious arrogance which sprang out now at the mere hint of opposition from someone he had at last found whom he could consider inferior to himself. I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn't the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper's snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“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

“So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all—plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“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, Peace Breaks Out

“The first person who says anything unpleasant will get a swift kick in the ass. ”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace, Notes

“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

“Je ne give a damn pas about le français, Les filles en France ne wear pas les pantelons”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“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

“Is he using terror to keep away boredom? Does he have to try to destroy something? Even as a last resort, himself?”
― John Knowles, Peace Breaks Out

“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, A Separate Peace

“There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding”
― 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, A Separate Peace