“ ...Mrs. Bostwick's face was heavy and lethargic, without any strength or delicacy, and it bore the deep marks of what must have been a habitual dissatisfaction. John Williams
“ It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock… John Williams
“ Stoner and Masters smiled at each other, and they spoke no more of the question that evening. But for years afterward, at odd moments, Stoner remembered what Masters had said; and though it brought hi… John Williams
“ It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw himself as he must thus appear; and what Edith said was part of what he saw. He had a glimpse of a figur… John Williams
“ It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the… John Williams
“ A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure--as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy o… John Williams
“ Sometimes Edith came into the room and sat on the bed beside him and they talked. They talked of trivial things – of people they knew casually, of a new building going up on the campus, of an old one… John Williams
“ But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before. John Williams
“ The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an inten… John Williams
“ A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty so… John Williams
“ It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. John Williams
“ Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out.""Yes, sir," Andrews said."Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and… John Williams
“ You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that… John Williams
“ In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion,… John Williams
“ In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end bu… John Williams
