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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.

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
First
Prayer
Always
Five
Never
Turns
Encountered
Half
Prayers
Night
Nine
Another
Eight
Might
Feet
Firsts
Turn

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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 did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.
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Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.
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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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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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Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.
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Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.
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Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
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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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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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The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.
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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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the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse
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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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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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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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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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It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.
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So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.
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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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