132 Quotes by John Knowles

...his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. “I believe you. It’s okay because I understand and I believe you.

Most of the students there, he said, don't know what they think. You tell 'em, they'll think it. I plan to tell 'em.

We spent that summer in complete selfishness, I'm happy to say. The people in the world who could be selfish in the summer of 1942 were a small band, and I'm glad we took advantage of it.

In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day i entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.

Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.

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

I had to be right in never talking about what you could not change, and I had to make many people agree that I was right. None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or because they could not understand it. I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way.

I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

I did not cry then or ever about Finney. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family’s straightlaced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.