Stoner Quotes

“it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love.

But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him--how many years ago?--by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Her life was invariable, like a low hum; and it was watched over by her mother, who, when Edith was a child, would sit for hours watching her paint her pictures or play her piano, as if no other occupation were possible for either of them.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Except for Edith's absence from it, his life was nearly what he wanted it to be.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“L'amore per la letteratura, per il linguaggio, per il mistero della mente e del cuore che si rivelano in quella minuta, strana e imprevedibile combinazione di lettere e parole, di neri e gelidi caratteri stampati sulla carta, l'amore che aveva sempre nascosto come se fosse illecito e pericoloso, cominciò a esprimersi dapprima in modo incerto, poi con coraggio sempre maggiore. Infine con orgoglio.”
― 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

“He found himself discovering pretexts for going to her apartment in the afternoons; the title of a book or article would occur to him, he would note it, and deliberately avoid seeing her in the afternoon to give her the title, have a cup of coffee, and talk.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance. And the consciousness of his inadequate distressed him so greatly that the sense of it grew habitual, as much a part of him as the stoop of his shoulders.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“It occurred to him that he ought to call Edith; and then he knew that he would not call her. The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“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

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before before him: that 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.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“The party was like many another. Conversation began desultorily, gathered a swift but feeble energy, and trailed irrelevantly into other conversations; laughter was quick and nervous, and it burst like tiny explosives in a continuous but unrelated barrage all over the room; and the members of the party flowed casually from one place to another, as if quietly occupying shifting positions of strategy.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Once there was a brief-lived demonstration against one of the professors, an old and bearded teacher of Germanic languages, who had been born in Munich and who as a youth attended the University of Berlin. But when the professor met the angry and flushed little group of students, blinked in bewilderment, and held out his thin, shaking hands to them, they disbanded in sullen confusion.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“He remembered that he spoke to her that she might look at him, remain near him, and give him the pleasure of hearing her soft, thin voice, answering his questions and making perfunctory questions in return.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Una guerra no mata unos miles o unos centenares de miles de jóvenes. Mata algo en la gente, algo que no puede recobrarse. Y si un pueblo sufre una determinada cantidad de guerras, pronto sólo queda el bruto, la criatura que nosotros…, usted y yo y otras personas como nosotros… hemos rescatado del barro … No se puede pedir a un estudioso que destruya aquello a cuya construcción ha consagrado la vida”.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Na biblioteca da universidade passeava entre a estantes, em meio a milhares de livros, inalando o odor mofado do couro, do tecido e das páginas ressecadas como se fosse um incenso exótico. Às vezes se detinha, tirava um volume das prateleiras e o segurava em suas mãos grandes, que vibravam com o contato, ainda insólito, com a lombada, a capa e as páginas dóceis. Depois, folheava o livro, lendo um parágrafo aqui e ali, seus dedos rígidos virando as páginas, quase temerosos de destruir com seu desajeitamento o precioso conteúdo.

Não tinha amigos, pela primeira vez em sua vida teve consciência de sua solidão. Às vezes, de noite em seu sótão, erguia os olhos de um livro que estava lendo e espiava os cantos escuros de seu quarto, onde a luz do lampião tremulava contra as sombras. Se olhasse fixo e atentamente, a escuridão se reuniria numa luz, que assumia a forma insubstancial do que estivera lendo. E ele sentia que estava fora do tempo, como sentira naquele dia na aula em que Archer Sloane falara com ele. O passado avolumava-se da escuridão onde jazia, e os mortos se erguiam para viver à sua frente, e juntos, fluíam para o presente entre os vivos, e assim, por um intenso instante, ele tinha a sensação de unir-se a eles numa única e densa realidade da qual não podia escapar. Tristão, Isolda a bela, caminhavam à sua frente; Helena, e o brilhantes Paris, seus rostos graves de amargura, erguiam-se da treva. E Stoner se sentia mais próximo deles do que de seus colegas que iam de aula em aula, hospedados numa grande universidade em Columbia, no Missouri, e que caminhavam distraídos em meio ao ar do Midwest.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that 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.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“So for the first year of her life, Grace Stoner knew only her father's touch, and his voice, and his love.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Pensaba en sus padres, y resultaban tan extraños cómo el hijo que habían engendrado; sentía por ellos una piedad ambigua y un amor distante”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Pensaba en sus padre, y resultaban tan extraños cómo el hijo que habían engendrado; sentía por ellos una piedad ambigua y un amor distante”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“But you're bright enough-and just bright enough-to realize what would happen to you in the world. You're cut out for failure, and you know it. Though you're capable of being a son-of-a-bitch, you're not quite ruthless enough to be so consistently. Though you're not precisely the most honest man I've ever known, neither are you heroically dishonest. On the one hand, you're capable of work, but you're just lazy enough so that you can't work as hard as the world would want you to. On the other hand, you're not quite so lazy that you can impress upon the world a sense of your importance.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Because then, none of it would mean anything-nothing we have done, nothing we have been. I almost certainly wouldn't be able to teach, and you-you would become something else. We both would become something else, something other than ourselves. We would be-nothing.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“He had come to that moment in his age when there occured to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something-even pain-to pierce him, to bring him alive.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“I don't give a damn about the Germans. When it comes down to it, I don't really give a damn about the Americans either. I suppose I'm doing it because it doesn't matter whether I do it or not. And it might be amusing to pass through the world once more before I return to the cloistered and slow extinction that awaits us all.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel