Top John Edward Williams Quotes

John Edward Williams Biography

John Edward Williams (August 29, 1922 – March 3, 1994) was an American author, editor and professor. He was best known for his novels Stoner (1965) and Augustus (1972). The latter won a U.S. National Book Award.

Read about John Edward Williams in Wikipedia

Random Authors

John Edward Williams Quotes

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.

Brought, Kills, Men, People, War, Young

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

Lasts, Love Is, Person, Process, Stoner, Years

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

Awareness, Book, Come, Littles, Serenity, Time

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

Becoming, Heart, Heaven, Know, Maturity, Ought

To read without joy is stupid.

Joy, Read, Stupid

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

Dangerous, Heart, Love, Mind, Proudly, Tentatively

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.

Defeats, History, Human, Military, Race, War

In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense.

Book, Cloth, Library, Musty, Odor

It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind.

Art, Difficult, Ignorance, Impose, Pride

Ernest King

Rooney Mara

Donald Cargill

Carl Perkins

Cate Edwards

Sam Peckinpah

Greta Salpeter

Schuyler Fisk

Bradley Wiggins

Katie Leclerc

Kit Harington

Elizabeth Siddal

John Edward Williams Biography

Contact Us

About us