Devon

“It was necessary to write about the war, to touch reader's hearts, to move them with words of love and sorrow, to bring to life electric moments, to let them, in the reading and the telling, fell they were there, in the past, with the author.”
― Bảo Ninh, The Sorrow of War

“But he knew that the world was creeping up on him, up on Katherine, and up on the little niche of it that they had thought was their own; and he watched the approach with a sadness of which he could not speak, even to Katherine.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that 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.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“The passing of beautiful youth had been so rapid that even its normal periods of anxiety and torment, of deep intrusive blind love, had been taken from him as the war clouds loomed. A moment so close, yet so far, then totally lost to him, to remain only as a memory forever.”
― Bảo Ninh, The Sorrow of War