Explore Quotes by John Knowles

Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half" was the first one I encountered. Another was, "Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.

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.

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.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

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

Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.

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.

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

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

As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.

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.

the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse

Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.

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.

It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.

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.

We are all born equally far from the sun.

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.