John Williams Quotes

It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw hims...

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you ...

For my friends do not desert me, and life stays; for those two things I must be grateful.

It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in...

Mankind in the aggregate I have found to be brutish, ignorant and unkind, whether those qualities we...

It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood an...

Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out.""Yes, ...

But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. D...

Edith’s clothes were flung in disarray on the floor beside the bed, the covers of which had been thr...

Stoner and Masters smiled at each other, and they spoke no more of the question that evening. But fo...

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been t...

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: th...

A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off somet...

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a quest...

A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was him...

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you ...

Sometimes Edith came into the room and sat on the bed beside him and they talked. They talked of tri...

While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had ...

The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before...

...Mrs. Bostwick's face was heavy and lethargic, without any strength or delicacy, and it bore the d...

Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failutre that his life must appear to be. He had wa...

But before [William Stoner] the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a fl...

He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

I am a man, and as foolish and weak as most men; if I have had an advantage over my fellows, it is t...

The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey throu...

But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever ...

she seemed happy, though perhaps a bit desperately so

He tried to shape in his mind what he had to say to McDonald. It was a feeling; it was an urge that ...

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been t...

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were ...

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a quest...

I was never that into the movies. Never. Even as a youngster. I became interested in movie music onl...

Et supper?" Foote asked."No, sir," Stoner answered.Mrs. Foote crooked an index finger at him and pad...

I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn't think I'd be quite ...

It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both, a...

He said slowly, “You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the signific...