Top 90 John Knowles Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.”

— John Knowles

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

— John Knowles

53. “Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I have not been able to identify its presence.”

— John Knowles

54. “We are all born equally far from the sun.”

— John Knowles

55. “We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction.”

— John Knowles

56. “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.”

— John Knowles

57. “It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.”

— John Knowles

58. “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.”

— John Knowles

59. “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.”

— John Knowles

60. “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.”

— John Knowles

61. “The ocean, throwing up foaming sun-sprays across some nearby rocks, was winter cold. This kind of sunshine and ocean, with the accumulating roar of the surf and the salty, adventurous, flirting wind from the sea, always intoxicated Phineas. He was everywhere, he enjoyed himself hugely, he laughed out loud at passing sea gulls. And he did everything he could think of for me.”

— John Knowles

62. “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.”

— John Knowles

63. “I thought the issue was settled until at the end he said, ‘Listen, pal, if I can’t play sports, you’re going to play them for me,’ and I lost part of myself to him, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.”

— John Knowles

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

— John Knowles

65. “Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft and stricken, since he was by nature someone who carried others. I didn’t think he knew how to act or even how to feel as the object of help.”

— John Knowles

66. “I did not cry then or ever about Finney. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family’s straightlaced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.”

— John Knowles

67. “Someone made a long speech listing every infraction of the rules we were committing that night. Someone else made a speech showing how by careful planning we could break all the others before dawn.”

— John Knowles

68. “Well, it’s a useful room.” “Yes, I guess it’s useful, all right.”

— John Knowles

69. “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.”

— John Knowles

70. “Wars were made by something ignorant in the human heart.”

— John Knowles

71. “The war was and is reality for me.”

— John Knowles

72. “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

73. “The winter loves me’, he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, ‘I mean as much as you can say a season can love. 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.’ I didn’t think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny’s: it should have been true. So I didn’t argue.”

— John Knowles

74. “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

75. “I didn’t know why he had chosen me, why it was only to me that he could show the most humbling sides of his handicap. I didn’t care. For the war was no longer eroding the peaceful summertime stillness I had prized so much at Devon, and although the playing fields were crusted under a foot of congealed snow and the river was now a hard gray-white lane of ice between gaunt trees, peace had come back to Devon for me.”

— John Knowles

76. “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

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

— John Knowles

78. “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

79. “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

80. “The crew waits for no man.”

— John Knowles

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

— John Knowles

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

— John Knowles

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

— John Knowles

84. “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

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

— John Knowles

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— John Knowles

91. “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

92. “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

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

— John Knowles

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

— John Knowles