John Knowles famous quotes

There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.
-- John Knowles

#Dream #Target #Harm

I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.
-- John Knowles

#Meaningful #Would Be #World

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart
-- John Knowles

#War #Heart #Stupidity

But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.
-- John Knowles

#Feelings #Levels #Deeper

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.
-- John Knowles

#Love You #Mean #Winter

Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.
-- John Knowles

#Prayer #Night #Might

Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.
-- John Knowles

#Teenager #Today #Accepting

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

#Peace #Men #Years

There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding
-- John Knowles

#Acceptance #People #Understanding

I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.
-- John Knowles

#Parent #Sometimes #Accepting

You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it’s the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment.
-- John Knowles

#Running #Thinking #Long

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.
-- John Knowles

#Moments

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
-- John Knowles

#Evolve

It was hard to remember in the heavy and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.
-- John Knowles

#Morning #Hate #Joy

But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.
-- John Knowles

#Used #Wanted #Findings

I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.
-- John Knowles

So the more things stay the same, the more they change after all.
-- John Knowles

#Peace #Separate Peace

As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.
-- John Knowles

#Summer #Sarcastic #Sarcasm

Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half" was the first one I encountered. Another was, "Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.
-- John Knowles

#Prayer #Night #Feet

As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.
-- John Knowles

#Wind #Faces #Sun

Life is fighting. In life, it's the look ahead that counts. We are all born equally far from the sun. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.
-- John Knowles

#Fighting #Land #Bridges

Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.
-- John Knowles

#Tree #Violence #Endure

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

#Dream #Regret #Looks

Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.
-- John Knowles

#Mean #Years #Important

All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.
-- John Knowles

#Enemy #Cost #Lines

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.
-- John Knowles

#Powerful #Mean #Reality

We are all born equally far from the sun.
-- John Knowles

#Sun #Born

Gene, on the desire to be Finny: "I lost part of myself to him then, 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

#Desire #Purpose #Firsts

It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.
-- John Knowles

#Immature #Affection #Demeaning

I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.
-- John Knowles

#Morning #Sleep #Night

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.
-- John Knowles

#Tree #Violence #Endure

Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.
-- John Knowles

#Sarcasm #Weak #Protest

Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.
-- John Knowles

#Peace #Children #Men

the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse
-- John Knowles

#Tone #Separate Peace #Force

I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.
-- John Knowles

#War #School #Hatred