John Knowles Quotes

John Knowles offers reflective, youthful musings on identity, war and growth that feel like a candid conversation.

30 quotes

1. He [Finny] had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.

2. He possessed an extra vigor, a heightened confidence in himself, a serene capacity for affection which saved him. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had.

3. 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.

4. Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It's all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you've got to be in a hurry. And when you're in a war you've got to be in a hurry. Don't you? So I guess maybe racing skiers weren't ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. . . I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn't it, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive.

5. 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.

6. You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with 'personality,' and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas.

7. Naturally I don't believe books and I don't believe teachers, but I do believe-it's important for me to believe you [Gene]. Christ, I've got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

11. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

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

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.

16. Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.

17. I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.

18. The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.

19. Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

20. 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.

21. Looking back, I think we were all quite mature, surprisingly responsible. In earlier wars, boys of our age had just gone off to raise hell or enlist or both, but we stayed dutifully at our desks doing tomorrow's homework.

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

23. 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.

24. Gene, on the desire to be Finny: "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.

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

26. We are all born equally far from the sun.

27. Sarcasm is the protest of the weak.

28. My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.

29. It was hard to remember in the heavy and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.

30. Exeter was, I suspect, more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives of almost anyone else who ever attended the school.