Knowles Quotes

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

Thank God I found the GOOD in goodbye

I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.

What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.

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.

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

Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

I'm always happy when I'm surrounded by water, I think I'm a Mermaid or I was a mermaid. The ocean makes me feel really small and it makes me put my whole life into perspective… it humbles you and makes you feel almost like you’ve been baptized. I feel born again when I get out of the ocean.

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.

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.

But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.

I did not know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.

When you love something it loves you back in whatever way it has to love.

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.

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

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.

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

You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it’s the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment.

When you really don’t like a guy, they’re all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they’re no longer interested.

It is a sad day when one looks back and sees that his largest regrets have become some of the most integral elements of his dreams.

I used to want you so bad, I'm so through with that because honestly you turned out to be the best thing I never had!

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.

This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way.

If he invited you out, he`s got to pay

Je ne give a damn pas about le français, Les filles en France ne wear pas les pantelons

As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.

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

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.

Gene, on the desire to be Finny: "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.

We only hate what we don't understand.

What else should I know? (1) There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it. (2) I would like to be friends with Beyoncé Knowles.

Tattoo your name across my heart, so it will remain / not even death could make us part / what kind is it / It could be a sweet dream or a beautiful nightmare / either way I don't want to wake up from you.

I'm learning how to drown out the constant noise that is such an inseparable part of my life. I don't have to prove anything to anyone, I only have to follow my heart and concentrate on what I want to say to the world. I run my world.

I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all—plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.

Most of the students there, he said, don't know what they think. You tell 'em, they'll think it. I plan to tell 'em.

I'm lying in my room listening to the birds outside. I used to think they sang because they were happy. But then I learned on a nature show they're really showing off. Trying to lure in some other bird so they can mate with it. Or let the other birds know not to get too close to their turf. I wish I never watched that show, because now all I think about is what those pretty sounds mean. And how they're not pretty at all.

Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

It was hard to remember in the heavy and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.

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

And sometimes you need too much to know the facts, and so humbly and stupidly you stay.

...I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. 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.

With a lot of success comes a lot of negativity.

Life is fighting. In life, it's the look ahead that counts. We are all born equally far from the sun. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.

He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.

Finny never permitted himself to realize that when you won they lost. That would have destroyed the perfect beauty which was sport.

Because 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.

But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved. And if it wasn't there, as for example with Phineas, then I put it there myself.

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

He was nodding his head, his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. “I believe you. It’s okay because I understand and I believe you. You’ve already shown me and I believe you.

We are all born equally far from the sun.

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

Make sure you have your own life before becoming someone's wife ~spoken to Oprah in an interview

What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.

Why talk about something you can't do anything about?

What goes around comes back around.

You can do more! A lot more. If you want a...record you can be proud of, you'll do a heck of a lot more than just what you have to.

Under political correctness, saying the right thing supplants doing the right thing.

I jounced the limb.

You never waste your time. That's why I have to do it for you.

I have this friend, Jake," Mr. Mitchell says, sitting on the edge of his desk. "One day, I needed a favor. It wasn't a big favor, but I called him and told him I needed something. Know what he said?" We shake our heads. "He said, 'Sure.' Before he eve knew what i was going to ask him. You know why?" We shake our heads again. "Because he trusted me not to ask him to do something he couldn't or wouldn't want to do. He knew that whatever i asked for, he would help me simply because he was my friend and I needed help. That's true friendship.

You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it's the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment. Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over.

There are times i hate you cause i cant erase the times you hurt me and put tears on my face

I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.

Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I have not been able to identify its presence.

What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love." I didn't think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true.

I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything. I couldn't help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little

Yup I put it on him, it ain't nothing I can't do, yup i buy my own, if he deserve it buy his shit too

People who worry about microaggressions usually have never faced macroaggressions.

Who am I to deny my Master pleasure, simply because it is not at the hands of myself? He is free to do as he will, because of the life that he has given me. I am thankful for him, for the fact that out of all of us, I am the one that he chooses to keep and care for as his own.

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.

It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.

...he's imagining himself Justice incarnate, balancing the scales. He's forgotten that Justice incarnate is not only balancing the scales but also blindfolded.

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

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

McVries seemed not to have heard. "These things, they don't even bear the weight of conversation," he said, "J.D. Salinger...John Knowles...even James Kirkwood and that guy Don Bredes...they've destroyed being an adolescent, Garraty. If you're a sixteen-year-boy, you can't discuss the pains of adolescent love with any decency anymore. You just come off sounding like fucking Ron Howard with a hardon." McVries laughed a little hysterically.

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

I breath in and out through my mouth to feel the quiet. In. Out. Over and over. Until I fall asleep.

Power's not given to you. You have to take it.

What happens when you finally decide to tell the truth and no one listens?

I think we reminded them of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen. We were registered with no draft board, we had taken no physical examinations. No one had ever tested us for hernia or color blindness. Trick knees and punctured eardrums were minor complaints and not yet disabilities which would separate a few from the fate of the rest. We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve. Anyway, they were more indulgent toward us than at any other time; they snapped at the heels of seniors, driving and molding and arming them for the war. They noticed our games tolerantly. We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction.

In the person of Quanah Parker, an extraordinary man in whom the blood of two strong peoples flowed, the Lone Star and the Comanche Moon at last found common ground.

Let us pray". We all slumped immediately and unthinkingly in to the awkward crouch in which God was addressed.

The first person who says anything unpleasant will get a swift kick in the ass.

What makes you so special? Why should you get it and all the rest of us be in the dark?" The momentum of the argument abruptly broke from his control. His face froze. "Because I've suffered," he burst out.

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.

Then for no reason at all, I felt magnificent. It was as though my body until that instant had simply been lazy as though the aches and exhaustion were all imagined, created from nothing in order to keep me from truly exerting myself. Now my body seemed at last to say, "Well, if you must have it, here!" and an accession of strength came flooding through me. Buoyed up, I forgot my usual feeling of routine self-pity when working out, I lost myself, oppressed mind along with aching body; all entanglements were shed, I broke into the clear.

This is a school,' said Pete in his level voice. 'All views can be expressed and considered here. We're not indoctrinating you.' Yes, well,' Hochschwender replied coolly, 'that's a matter of point of view.

The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary with age, enfeebled, dry. So more the things remain the same, the more they change after all. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed, I headed back though the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come out of the rain.

Now here it was after all, preserved by some considerate hand with varnisch and wax. Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn't even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the abscence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify it's presence. 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. I felt fear's echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompanient and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky

From my locker I collected my sneakers, jock strap, and gym pants and then turned away, leaving the door ajar for the first time, forlornly open and abandoned, the locker unlocked. This was more final than the moment when the Headmaster handed me my diploma. My schooling was over now.

We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve. Anyway, they were more indulgent toward us than at any other time; they snapped at the heels of the seniors, driving and molding and arming them for the war. They noticed our games tolerantly. We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction.

That word can be very extreme… But I guess I am a modern-day feminist. I do believe in equality. Why do you have to choose what type of woman you are? Why do you have to label yourself anything? I’m just a woman and I love being a woman. If you’re attractive then you can’t be sexy, and you can’t be intelligent? What is all of that? -from Vogue

So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as i bore on us, overwhelming in its rush, seemingly inescapable, and then at the last moment eluded by a word from Phineas; I had simply ducked, that was all,and the wave's concentrated power had hurtled harmlessly overhead, no doubt throwing others roughly up on th beach, but leaving me peaceably treading water as before. I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.

The winter loves me', he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, 'I mean as much as you can say a season can love. What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.' I didn't think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true. So I didn't argue.

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. Only Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone. Other people experienced this fearful shock somewhere, this sighting of the enemy...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.

As I had to do whenever I glimpsed this river, I thought of Phineas. Not of the tree and pain, but of one of his favorite tricks, Phineas in exaltation, balancing on one foot on the prow of a canoe like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured, body a complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all the others to maintain this supreme fantasy of achievement, his skin glowing from immersions, his whole body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might by gently pushing upward with his foot glide a little way higher and remain suspended in space, encompassing all the glory of the summer and offering it to the sky.

I turned with an inward groan to look at him. Quackenbush wasn't going to let me just do the work for him like the automaton I wished to be. We were going to have to be pitted against each other. It was easy enough now to see why. For Quackenbush had been systematically disliked since he first set foot in Devon, with careless, disinterested insults coming at him from the beginning, voting for and applauding the class leaders through years of attaining nothing he wanted for himself. I didn't want to add to his humiliations; I even sympathized with his trembling, goaded egotism he could no longer contain, the furious arrogance which sprang out now at the mere hint of opposition from someone he had at last found whom he could consider inferior to himself. I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn't the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper's snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.