A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. …

- John Edward Williams

In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as…

- John Edward Williams

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity fo…

- John Edward Williams

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victori…

- John Edward Williams

To read without joy is stupid.

- John Edward Williams

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he …

- John Edward Williams

It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making ju…

- John Edward Williams

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the perso…

- John Edward Williams

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of l…

- John Edward Williams