Quotes by John Knowles

“Swimming isnt the most thrilling sport in the world, far from it; its a damn bore most of the time, but it does make you healthy and gives you a good body. I finished first as the anchor man in the final, decisive relay against Andover, to become an athletic mini-hero for about 15 minutes.”

“Looking back, I think we were all quite mature, surprisingly responsible. In earlier wars, boys of our age had just gone off to raise hell or enlist or both, but we stayed dutifully at our desks doing tomorrows homework.”

“Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.”

“We really did have a club whose members jumped from the branch of a very high tree into the river as initiation.”

“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.”

“Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasnt just the 40s, either. In the 30s and in the 50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.”

“Well, you know, there was the most enormous youth rebellion during the 30s. There was the Peace Pledge Union, which supposedly involved the cream of British youth. They thought wars were ridiculous and said just what everybody says today. They said they would not fight in any war.”

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

“The novel has one peculiarity for a school novel: It never attacks the place; it isnt an expose; it doesnt show sadistic masters or depraved students, or use any of the other school-novel sensationalistic cliches. Thats because I didnt experience things like that there.”

“As a kid from a border state, I found the New Hampshire winter breathtakingly cold - for a while I didnt think I could breathe there at all - but I survived to return for the summer session of 1943.”

Never say you are five feet nine whenyou are five feet eight and a half was the first one I encountered.Another was, Always say some prayers at night because it might turnout that there is a God.

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.

Why talk about something you cant do anything about?

I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding

...his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. “I believe you. It’s okay because I understand and I believe you.

Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.

In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day i entered it, was vibrantly real while i was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left

Most of the students there, he said, dont know what they think. You tell em, theyll think it. I plan to tell em.

I had to be right in never talking about what you could not change, and I had to make many people agree that I was right. None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or because they could not understand it. I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way.