Stoner

by John Williams

“The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build.”

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

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.

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.

He did not allow himself the easy luxury of guilt;

They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.