John Knowles (/noʊlz/; September 16, 1926 – November 29, 2001) was an American novelist best known for A Separate Peace (1959). He died in 2001 at the age of 75.
Sarcasm is the protest of the weak.
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.
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.
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.
There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.
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.
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.
There are simply more young people than there ever were. You get this feeling of strength. Also, large numbers can be a drawback, making it difficult to lose one's anonymity.
As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.
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.
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.
Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse
My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.
Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.
The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.
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.
There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding
Peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.
The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.