132 Quotes by John Knowles

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

I saw on the pad not an operator's number from my home town, but one which seemed to interrupt the beating of my heart.

Must like the rest of us on the surface, he had an underlying obliging and considerate strain which barred him from being a really important member of the class. You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with "personality," and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas.

I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.

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.

The Master was slipping from his official position momentarily, and it was just possible, if Phineas pressed hard enough, that there might be a flow of simple, unregulated friendliness between them, and such flows were one of Finny's reasons for living.

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

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. And if it wasn't there, as for example with Phineas, then I put it there myself.

Because 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.