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It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.

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
Virtually
Affection
Everyone
Scrape
Demeaning
Encountered
Immature

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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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The next major advance in the health of the American people will be determined by what the individual is willing to do for himself.
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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 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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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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I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.
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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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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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The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.
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Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.
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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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Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.
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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.
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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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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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So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.
John Knowles
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So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.
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Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
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the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse
John Knowles