Top 150 John Williams Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “You are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky.”

— John Williams

102. “Hij begreep dat hij in die toekomst zou veranderen, maar hij zag de toekomst zelf als het instrument van verandering en niet als het doel ervan.”

— John Williams

103. “It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by a great desert surrounding it.”

— John Williams

104. “Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.”

— John Williams

105. “It was a world of half-light in which they lived and to which they brought the better parts of themselves – so that, after a while, the outer world where people walked and spoke, where there was change and continual movement, seemed to them false and unreal. Their lives were sharply divided between the two worlds, and it seemed to them natural that they should live so divided.”

— John Williams

106. “He had no friends and for the first time in his life he became aware of loneliness. Sometimes, in his attic room at night, he would look up from a book he was reading and gaze in the dark corners of his room, where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. If he stared long and intently, the darkness gathered into a light, which took the insubstantial shape of what he had been reading.”

— John Williams

107. “So I must be locked up, where I can be safely irresponsible, where I can do no harm.”

— John Williams

108. “The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape.”

— John Williams

109. “And the consciousness of his inadequacy distressed him so greatly that the sense of it grew habitual, as much a part of him as the stoop of his shoulders.”

— John Williams

110. “One must be prepared to suffer for one’s beliefs.”

— John Williams

111. “I’ve never wanted to admit it to myself,” he said with something like tranquillity, “but you really do hate me, don’t you, Edith?”

— John Williams

112. “I’m too bright for this world, and I won’t keep my mouth shut up about it; it’s a disease for which there is no cure. So I must be locked up, where I can be safely irresponsible, where I can do no harm.”

— John Williams

113. “It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that’s just protective coloration.”

— John Williams

114. “He was drained of feeling, and he felt very old and tired.”

— John Williams

115. “But I can see what has ensued. 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. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we – you and I and others like us – have brought up from the slime.” He paused for a long moment; then he smiled slightly. “The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build.”

— John Williams

116. “Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed.”

— John Williams

117. “Nearly every afternoon, when his classes were over, he came to her apartment. They made love, and talked, and made love again, like children who did not think of tiring at their play. The spring days lengthened, and they looked forward to the summer.”

— John Williams

118. “He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.”

— John Williams

119. “La voce era secca e monocorde e gli usciva dalle labbra quasi immobili, senza espressione o intonazione, mentre le sue lunghe dita sottili si muovevano con grazia e decisione, come per restituire alle parole quella forma che la voce non riusciva a dargli.”

— John Williams

120. “Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life.”

— John Williams

121. “He stood looking at her for a long time. He felt a distant pity and reluctant friendship and familiar respect; and he felt also a weary sadness, for he knew that no longer could the sight of her bring upon him the agony of desire that he had once known, and knew that he would never again be moved as he had once been moved by her presence. The sadness lessened, and he covered her gently, turned out the light, and got in bed beside her.”

— John Williams

122. “But don’t you know, Mr. Stoner?” Sloane asked. “Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.” Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, “Are you sure?” “I’m sure,” Sloane said softly. “How can you tell? How can you be sure?” “It’s love, Mr. Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. “You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”

— John Williams

123. “Though he remembered the authors and their works and their dates and.”

— John Williams

124. “The smell of smoke from trash burning in back yards was held by the mist; and as he walked slowly through the evening, breathing the fragrance and tasting upon his tongue the sharp night-time air, it seemed to him that the moment he walked in was enough and that he might not need a great deal more.”

— John Williams

125. “Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment. She was an only child, and loneliness was one of the earliest conditions of her life.”

— John Williams

126. “And it might be amusing to pass through the world once more before I return to the cloistered and slow extinction that awaits us all.”

— John Williams

127. “The poets say that youth is the day of the fevered blood, the hour of love, the moment of passion; and that with age comes the cooling baths of wisdom, whereby the fever is cured. The poets are wrong. I did not know love until late in my life, when I could no longer grasp it. Youth is ignorant, and its passion is abstract.”

— John Williams

128. “She had got the habit of silence; and though she reserved a shy, soft smile for her father, she would not talk to him.”

— John Williams

129. “One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care.”

— John Williams

130. “It occurred to him that he had never before known the body of another; and it occurred to him further that that was the reason he had always somehow separated the self of another from the body that carried that self around. And it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment.”

— John Williams

131. “So the bed that had been the arena of their passion became the support of her illness.”

— John Williams

132. “During that decade when many men’s faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy.”

— John Williams

133. “Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment.”

— John Williams

134. “And it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment.”

— John Williams

135. “A new tranquillity had come between them. It was a quietness that was like the beginning of love; and almost without thinking, Stoner knew why it had come. They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.”

— John Williams

136. “It was a strategy that disguised itself as love and concern, and thus one against which he was helpless.”

— John Williams

137. “Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with.”

— John Williams

138. “Though they got along well enough together, they had not become close friends; they had no confidences and seldom saw each other outside their weekly gatherings.”

— John Williams

139. “You spend nearly a year of your life and sweat, because you have faith in the dream of a fool. And what have you got? Nothing.”

— John Williams

140. “Mata algo en la gente, algo que no puede recobrarse.”

— John Williams

141. “That was on a Tuesday, and for the next two days the manuscript lay untouched on his desk. For reasons that he did not fully understand, he could not bring himself to open the folder, to begin the reading which a few months before would have been a duty of pleasure. He watched it warily, as if it were an enemy that was trying to entice him again into a war that he had renounced.”

— John Williams

142. “For an intsant he felt the truth of what he said, and for the first time in months he felt lift away from him the weight of a despair whose heaviness he had not fully realized. Nearly giddy, almost laughing, he said again, ‘It really isn’t important.”

— John Williams

143. “He said, ‘In theory, your life is your own to lead. In theory, you ought to be able to screw anybody you want to, do anything you want to, and it shouldn’t matter so long as it doesn’t interfere with your teaching. But damn it, your life isn’t your own to lead. It’s – oh, hell. You know what I mean.”

— John Williams

144. “He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be.”

— John Williams

145. “He saw the sickness of the world and of his own country during the years after the great war; he saw hatred and suspicion become a kind of madness that swept across the land like a swift plague; he saw young men go again to war, marching eagerly to a senseless doom, as if in the echo of a nightmare. And the pity and sadness he felt were so old, so much a part of his age, that he seemed to himself nearly untouched.”

— John Williams

146. “One moment was juxtaposed against another, yet isolated from it, and he had the feeling that he was removed from time, watching as it passed before him like a great unevenly turned diorama.”

— John Williams

147. “We really haven’t known each other very well these last few years, have we?” She looked away and said uncomfortably, “Well – I suppose not.”

— John Williams

148. “The barbarian waits, and we grow weaker in the security of our ease and pleasure.”

— John Williams

149. “Edith smiled at him with a curious mixture of fondness and contempt.”

— John Williams

150. “He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something – even pain – to pierce him, to bring him alive.”

— John Williams