John Williams > Quotes

“Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Oh, how proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason to be improper! It takes being in love to know something about yourself. Sometimes, with you, I feel like the slut of the world, the eager, faithful slut of the world. Does that seem proper to you?”
― John Williams

“في شبابه ظن ستونر أن الحب حالة وجودية صرفة قد يدركها المرء إن كان محظوظًا، وفي سنين نضجه قرر أن الحب هو نعيم دين خادع، يجب أن يحدق فيه المرء بكفر مرح، وعصيان مالوف وطيب، وحنين مرتبك. والآن بدأ يدرك، وهو في منتصف العمر، أن الحب لا هو بحالة إجلال ولا هو بوهم، بل تحرك إنساني نحو الصيرورة، ظرف يتم اختلاقه، وتعديله يومًا بعد يوم، ودقيقة تلو الأخرى، بالإرادة والعقل والقلب.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“سار ببطء نحو ضوء الشمس، نحو العالم المفتوح الذي بدا له، أينما ولّي وجهه، كالسجن.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“وقد يكون الترحال في العالم ممتعا قبل العودة مرة أخرى للرهبانية والتحلل البطيء الذي ينتظرنا جميعًا.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“مع ذلك كان يشعر أحيانًا إنه يحني ظهره عبثًا أمام العاصفة ويداري بيديه بلا جدوى شعلة آخر أعواد ثقابه الضعيفة.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“فقد تعلما أن يكونا معًا بدون كلام، وصارت عادتهما السكون.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“شعر بأن العيش ممكنًا، وحتى السعادة ممكنة، من حين لآخر.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“حين كان يفكر في الموت من قبل كان يعده إما حدث أدبيًا أو إنه الإنهاك البطيء الهادئ الذي يفعله الزمن في الجسد الفاني. لم يفكر فيه کانفجار عنيف في معركة، أو تدفق دم مفاجئ من رقبة.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“خطر له أن يبدا، متأخرًا عشر سنوات، في إكتشاف نفسه، وكان من رآه لا بأكثر ولا بأقل مما تخيله عن نفسه من قبل.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“لكن ويليام ستونر كان يفهم العالم على نحو لم يفهمه سوى القليل من طلبته. كان في أعماقه، أسفل ذاكرته، يعرف جيدًا القسوة والجوع والجلد والألم، ومع أنه كان نادرًا ما يفكر في سنواته الأولى في مزرعة بونفيل، كانت معرفته بالدم الذي ورثه قريبة من وعيه دائمًا، الدم الذي ورثه عن أسلافه الذين عاشوا حياة مبهمة وقاسية، ولم يكن لهم من هدف سوى أن يقدموا لعالم قمعي وجوهًا خشنة وكئيبة وخالية من التعبير.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“أدرك أنه كان كان يظن أنهما لما يكونا موجودين قبل أن يلتقيا.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“قال لنفسه إن هذا ليس بالكثير، لكن كان يعرف أنه كل ما لديه.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“A veces, inmerso en sus libros, le venía a la cabeza la conciencia de todo lo que no sabía, de todo lo que no había leído, y la serenidad con la que trabajaba se hacía trizas cuando caía en la cuenta del poco tiempo que tenía en la vida para leer tantas cosas, para aprender todo lo que tenía que saber.”
― John Williams

“ألفى نفسه يتساءل ما إذا كانت حياته تستحق عيشها، ما إذا كانت حياته كائنة أصلًا”
― John Williams, Stoner

“تعلم ويليام ستونر في عامه الثالث والأربعين ما تعلمه الآخرون، الأصغر منه بكثير، أن الحب الأول ليس الحب الأخير، وأن الحب ليس النهاية، بل عملية يحاول من خلالها المرء معرفة الآخر.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love.

But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him--how many years ago?--by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“rather awkwardly shy and therefore at times defensive and rather too assertive”
― John Williams

“He tried to shape in his mind what he had to say to McDonald. It was a feeling; it was an urge that he had to speak. But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year.”
― John Williams

“Confronted as we are by the mystery of literature, and by its inenarrable power, we are behooved to discover the source of the power and mystery. And yet, finally, what can avail? The work of literature throws before us a profound veil which we cannot plumb. And we are but votaries before it, helpless in its sway. Who would have the temerity to lift that veil aside, to discover the undiscoverable, to reach the unreachable? The strongest of us are but the puniest weaklings, are but tinkling cymbals and sounding brass, before the eternal mystery.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“He said, 'In theory, your life is your own to lead. In theory, you ought to be able to screw anybody you want to, do anything you want to, and it shouldn't matter so long as it doesn't interfere with your teaching. But damn it, your life isn't your own to lead. It's--oh, hell. You know what I mean.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“The years of the war blurred together, and Stoner went through them as he might have gone through a driving and nearly unendurable storm, his head down, his jaw locked, his mind fixed upon the next step and the next and the next. Yet for all his stoical endurance and his stolid movement through the days and weeks, he was an intensely divided man. One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the classrooms emptied of their young men, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh. He had not thought of it as the explosion of violence upon a battlefield, as the gush of blood from the ruptured throat. He wondered at the difference between the two kinds of dying, and what the difference meant; and he found growing in him some of that bitterness he had glimpsed once in the living heart of his friend David Masters.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“What did you expect? he asked himself.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“... La persona que uno ama al principio no es la que ama al final, y el amor no es un fin sino un proceso através del cual una persona intenta conocer a otra.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“One moment was juxtaposed against another, yet isolated from it, and he had the feeling that he was removed from time, watching as it passed before him like a great unevenly turned diorama.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“I am a man, and as foolish and weak as most men; if I have had an advantage over my fellows, it is that I have known this of myself, and have therefore known their weaknesses, and never presumed to find much more strength and wisdom in myself than I found in another. It was one of the sources of my power, that knowledge.”
― John Williams

“His voice was flat and dry, and it came through barely moving lips without expression or intonation; but his long thing fingers moved with grace and persuasion, as if giving to the words a shape that his voice could not.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“He found himself trembling; as awkwardly as a boy he went around the coffee table & sat beside her. Tentatively, clumsily, their hands went out to each other; they clasped each other in an awkward, strained embrace; and for a long time, they sat together without moving, as if any movement might let escape from them the strange & terrible thing that they held between them in a single grasp.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“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 figure that flitted through smoking-room anecdotes, and through the pages of cheap fiction--a pitiable fellow going into his middle age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself, awkwardly and apishly reaching for the youth he could not have, a fatuous, garishly got-up clown at whom the world laughed out of discomfort, pity, and contempt. He looked at this figure as closely as he could; but the longer he looked, the less familiar it became. It was not himself that he saw, and he knew suddenly that it was no one.”
― John Williams, Stoner