JOHN KNOWLES

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.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't 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.

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

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.

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 tomorrow's homework.

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

The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.

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.

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.

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart

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.

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.

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.

Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.

There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.

the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse

I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.

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.

Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.

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.

But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

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.

We are all born equally far from the sun.