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Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

John Knowles

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John Knowles
Age: 75 †
Born: 1926
Born: September 16
Died: 2001
Died: November 29
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Fairmont
West Virginia
Mean
Clarity
Important
Escape
Great
Across
Interval
Made
Lived
Undertaking
Years
Looking
Undertakings
Fear
Intervals
Back
Succeeded
Must
Fifteen

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But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.
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I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform I was on active duty all my time at school I killed my enemy there.
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Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half was the first one I encountered. Another was, Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.
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Exeter was, I suspect, more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives of almost anyone else who ever attended the school.
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Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.
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Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come.
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It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.
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the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse
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What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.
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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.
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The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.
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Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
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Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.
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All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all if he was indeed the enemy.
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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.
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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.
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