Top 150 John Williams Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “It’s love, Mr. Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. “You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”

— John Williams

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— John Williams

112. “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

113. “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

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

— John Williams

115. “I am a man, and as foolish and weak as most men; if I have had an advantage over my fellows, it is that I have known this of myself, and have therefore known their weaknesses, and never presumed to find much more strength and wisdom in myself than I found in another. It was one of the sources of my power, that knowledge.”

— John Williams

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

— John Williams

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— John Williams

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

— John Williams

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “He spoke more confidently and felt a warm hard severity gather within him. 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

126. “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

127. “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

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. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “Carefully, with his eyes squinted, with the light glistening upon his fair skin and thinning blond hair, like a chemist measuring a rare substance, he poured the beer from the bottles into glasses.”

— John Williams

134. “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

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. “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

137. “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

138. “Edith’s was a campaign waged with such cleverness and skill that he could find no rational grounds for complaint.”

— John Williams

139. “It takes being in love to learn something about yourself.”

— John Williams

140. “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

141. “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

142. “She seemed happiest when she was alone; she would sit for hours working needlepoint or embroidering tablecloths and napkins, with a tiny indrawn smile on her lips.”

— John Williams

143. “Sometimes he thought of himself as he had been a few years before and was astonished by the memory of that strange figure, brown and passive as the earth from which it has emerged.”

— 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. “Nos creemos muy recatados cuando no tenemos motivos para perder el recato. Hay que estar enamorado para conocerse bien.”

— John Williams

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

— John Williams

148. “Edith’s strategy became more indirect, more quiet and contained.”

— John Williams

149. “It’s not that they were worth anything. But they were mine.”

— John Williams

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

— John Williams