## Metadata - Author: [[John Williams and John McGahern]] - Full Title: Stoner - Category: #books ## Highlights - There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. ([Location 584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=584)) - The party was like many another. Conversation began desultorily, gathered a swift but feeble energy, and trailed irrelevantly into other conversations; ([Location 1374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=1374)) - And when he told of the long days and evenings he had spent alone in his room, reading to escape the limitations that his twisted body imposed upon him and finding gradually a sense of freedom that grew more intense as he came to understand the nature of that freedom—when he told of this, William Stoner felt a kinship that he had not suspected; he knew that Lomax had gone through a kind of conversion, an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words, as Stoner himself had once done, in the class taught by Archer Sloane. ([Location 1386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=1386)) - They sat close together amid the debris of the party, as if on an island, huddling together for warmth and assurance. ([Location 1392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=1392)) - They sat most of the day before the small tree, talked, and watched the lights twinkle on the ornaments and the tinsel wink from the dark green fir like buried fire. ([Location 1563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=1563)) - Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom. He had hoped that time and experience would repair the gulf; but they had not done so. Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance. ([Location 1567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=1567)) - The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly. ([Location 1576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=1576)) - He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence. ([Location 1583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=1583)) - In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another. ([Location 2673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=2673)) - “Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?” ([Location 2720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=2720)) - 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. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak. And though he looked upon them with apparent impassivity, he was aware of the times in which he lived. During that decade when many men’s faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass; he saw them walk up to back doors, with the bitter pride of men who go to their executions, and beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again; and he saw men, who had once walked erect in their own identities, look at him with envy and hatred for the poor security he enjoyed as a tenured empoyee of an institution that somehow could not fail. He did not give voice to this awareness; but the knowledge of common misery touched him and changed him in ways that were hidden deep from the public view, and a quiet sadness for the common plight was never far beneath any moment of his living. ([Location 3008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003K15IF8&location=3008))