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The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.

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
Best
Ever
Exeter
Letdown
Afterward
Yale
Distinct
Experienced
Teaching

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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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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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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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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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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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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.
John Knowles
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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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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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Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
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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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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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Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.
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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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Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.
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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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Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.
John Knowles
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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.
John Knowles
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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