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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
Teaching
Best
Ever
Exeter
Letdown
Afterward
Yale
Distinct
Experienced

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the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse
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Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.
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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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Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
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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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Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.
John Knowles
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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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But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.
John Knowles