Stoner

by John Williams

Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.

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.

They had come to that point in their life together when they seldom spoke of themselves or each other, lest the delicate balance that made their living together possible be broken.

love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them; and since the embodiment came before the recognition of the truth, it seemed a discovery that belonged to them alone.

He looked at this figure as closely as he could; but the longer he looked, the less familiar it became. It was not himself that he saw, and he knew suddenly that it was no one.

They revealed that knowledge by grammatical usage: they progressed from the perfect—”We have been happy, haven’t we?”—to the past—”We were happy—happier than anyone, I think”—and at last came to the necessity of discourse.

he realized the futility and waste of committing one’s self wholly to the irrational and dark forces that impelled the world toward its unknown end;