John Edward Williams quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Edward Williams

John Edward Williams Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Edward Williams on Wise Famous Quotes.

She has always seemed to me the epitome of womankind: coldly suspicious, politely ill-tempered, and narrowly selfish.

He looked at them curiously, as if he had not seen them before, and felt very distant from them and very close to them.

A WEEK BEFORE commencement, at which Stoner was to receive his doctorate, Archer Sloane offered him a full-time instructorship at the University.

One must be prepared to suffer for one's beliefs.

Lust and learning. That's really all there is, isn't it?

Deliberately, as if committing himself to something, he stepped forward and walked down the path to the porch and knocked on the front door.

No, sir, Stoner said, and the decisiveness of his voice surprised him. He thought with some wonder of the decision he had suddenly made.

She turned to him and pulled her lips in what he knew must be a smile. Not at all. I'm having a lovely time. Really.

But we were never really - together. Even when we made love.

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

Busying herself with inconsequential tasks.

To care not for one's self is of little moment, but to care not for those whom one has loved is another matter.

The strongest of us are but the puniest weaklings, are but tinkling cymbals and sounding brass, before the eternal mystery.

He did his work at the University as he did his work on the farm - thoroughly, conscientiously, with neither pleasure nor distress.

Rather awkwardly shy and therefore at times defensive and rather too assertive

Stoner said to Finch, I have no wish to retire before I have to, merely to accommodate a whim of Professor Lomax.

Every victory enlarges the magnitude of our possible defeat.

The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.

When at last he came to his decision, it seemed to him that he had known all along what it would be.

But there is much that cannot go into books, and that is the loss with which I become increasingly concerned.

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

They walked with some purpose, yet without particular hurry,

She seemed happy, though perhaps a bit desperately so

Beneath his awe, he had a sudden sense of security and serenity he had never felt before.

He was our enemy, but as it is strange, after so many years the death of an old enemy is like the death of an old friend.

His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure.

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

Finch turned to the other men and without raising his voice managed to call out to them.

Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.

Lust and learning," Katherine once said. "That's really all there is, isn't it?

When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh.

From the marriage had come only one child; he had wanted a son and had got a girl, and that was another disappointment he hardly bothered to conceal.

Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve.

That is the very best time of life, he thought again: when you are very young, when living is a simple, perfect succession of golden days.

For a few moments in the evening, then, they talked quietly and casually, as if they were old friends or exhausted enemies.

Stoner saw them through a haze, as if he were an audience.

The iconoclasm need not be loud and messy, I can almost hear him saying,

He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.

He thought of the years before, the distant years with his parents on the farm, and of the deadness from which he had been miraculously revived.

Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.

He felt the logic of grammar, and he thought he perceived how it spread out from itself, permeating the language and supporting human thought.

Looking at her, Stoner was assailed by a consciousness of his own heavy clumsiness.