John Knowles Quotes

There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.

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.

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

We are all born equally far from the sun.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it’s the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment.

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.

Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.

As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.

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.

I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.

There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding

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.

The next major advance in the health of the American people will be determined by what the individual is willing to do for himself.

Peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.

Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.

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.

Sarcasm is the protest of the weak.

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.

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.

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.

Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come.

But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.