John Williams, Stoner
7 quotes
"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 soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime."
"But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before."
"While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time."
"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 of what his life had been."
"But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain."
"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 him no vision of the University to which he had committed himself, it did reveal to him something about his relationship to the two men, and it gave him a glimpse of the corrosive and unspoiled bitterness of youth."
"...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."