Explore Quotes by John Knowles

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

There are simply more young people than there ever were. You get this feeling of strength. Also, large numbers can be a drawback, making it difficult to lose one's anonymity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It is a sad day when one looks back and sees that his largest regrets have become some of the most integral elements of his dreams.

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

This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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