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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.

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
Going
Forever
Partly
Years
Wrong
Thousands
People
Times
Shooting
War
Fronts
Come
Front
Whole
Asked
Real
Respect
Mean
Memories

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