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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.

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
Children
Town
Railroad
Men
Towns
Mill
World
Seemed
Railroads
Among
Mills
Playing
Yard
Peace
Yards
Nothing
Heroic
Converging
Whole
Elsewhere
Stranded

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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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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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Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.
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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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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.
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So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.
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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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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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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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It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.
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