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the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse

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
Curse
Tone
Turned
Word
Force
Scornful

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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 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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As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.
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Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
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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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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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It is a sad day when one looks back and sees that his largest regrets have become some of the most integral elements of his dreams.
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Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.
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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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It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.
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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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The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.
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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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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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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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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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As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.
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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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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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Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.
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