Literary Birthday – 16 September – John Knowles
John Knowles was born on 16 September 1926 and died on 29 November 2001.
John Knowles Quotes
- Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.
- 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.
- There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.
- 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.
- Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
- 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.
John Knowles was an American novelist who studied at Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University. He is best known for his first novel, A Separate Peace, which explores friendship, rivalry, guilt, and the loss of innocence at a boys’ boarding school during the Second World War. Knowles wrote several other novels, including Phineas, Peace Breaks Out, A Stolen Past, and The Private Life of Axie Reed. He also wrote Double Vision, a travelogue. Knowles’s fiction focuses on characters caught between opposing sides of their personalities. His stories examine the conflict between instinct and self-control, freedom and responsibility, and the wild and pragmatic sides of human nature. Knowles received the William Faulkner Award and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Source for photograph: Simon & Schuster
by Amanda Patterson
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