"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 bu..."
- John Williams
"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, ..."
"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..."
"Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out.""Yes, sir," Andrews said."Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and..."
"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 so..."
"I am a man, and as foolish and weak as most men; if I have had an advantage over my fellows, it is that I have known this of myself, and have therefore known their weaknesses, and never presumed to fi..."
"The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an inten..."
"But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before."
"Sometimes Edith came into the room and sat on the bed beside him and they talked. They talked of trivial things – of people they knew casually, of a new building going up on the campus, of an old one ..."
"For my friends do not desert me, and life stays; for those two things I must be grateful."