To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life – that complex design I had been weaving since birth with all its dark threads, its unexplainable symbols set against a conventional background of domestic white and schoolboy blue, all those tangled strands which required the dexterity of a virtuoso to keep flowing – I yearned to take giant military shears to it, snap! bitten off in an instant...

— John Knowles

John Knowles Quotes

We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve.

— John Knowles

They too seemed permanent and never-changing, an untouched unreachable world high in space...

— John Knowles

Yes, he had practically saved my life. He had also practically lost it for me.

— John Knowles

It was as though they felt it was especially unfair that it should strike one of the sixteen-year-olds, one of the few young men who could be free and happy in the summer of 1942.

— John Knowles

There was no latent snobbery in us; we didn’t find any in them. It was only that we could feel a deep and sincere difference between us and them, a difference which everyone struggled with awkward fortitude to bridge.

— John Knowles

No one cared, no one exercised any real discipline over us; we were on our own.

— John Knowles

I felt better. Yes, I sensed it like the sweat of relief when nausea passes away; I felt better. We were even after all, even in enmity. The deadly rivalry was on both sides after all.

— John Knowles

Because it was what you had in your heart that counted.

— John Knowles

My aid alone had never seemed to him in the category of help. The reason for this occurred to me as the procession moved slowly across the brilliant foyer to the doors; Phineas had thought of me as an extension of himself.

— John Knowles

If only I had truly taken advantage of the situation, seized and held and prized the multitudes of advantages the summer offered me; if only I had.

— John Knowles

I began at that point the emotional examination to note how far my convalescence had gone – I was taller, bigger generally in relation to these stairs, I had more money and success and “security” than in the days when specters seemed to go up and down with me.

— John Knowles

It is the beauty of small areas of order – a large heard, a group of trees, three similar dormitories, a circle of old houses – living together in contentious harmony.

— John Knowles

There were several trees bleakly reaching into the fog. Any one of them might have been the one I was looking for.

— John Knowles

Yet here was a scattered grove of trees, none of them of any particular grandeur.

— John Knowles

When they torpedo the troopship,” he shouted, “ you can’t stand around admiring the view. Jump!

— John Knowles

You didn’t shame anybody into anything.” “Oh yes I did. I’m good for you that way. You have a tendency to back away from things otherwise.

— John Knowles

There isn’t any question that we are conforming in every possible way to everything that’s happening and everything that’s going to happen.

— John Knowles

All foreign lands are inaccessible except to servicemen; they are vague, distant, and sealed off as though behind a curtain of plastic.

— John Knowles

Sentivo che non ero, non ero mai stato e non sarei mai stato una parte vivente di questo mondo straordinariamente solido e profondamente significativo che mi circonda.

— John Knowles

To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life – that complex design I had been weaving since birth with all its dark threads, its unexplainable symbols set against a conventional background of domestic white and schoolboy blue, all those tangled strands which required the dexterity of a virtuoso to keep flowing – I yearned to take giant military shears to it, snap! bitten off in an instant...

— John Knowles
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