“It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance.”

“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...”

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religio...”

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and t...”

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty...”

“The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an in...”

“A Wise Mind Makes a Wise Heart”

“Nobody will ever be able to understand the meaning of the measure of his own words.”

“Wisdom's Way to Wonder?Yes, Your Majesty? Wiseoneder, What say you of days and nights?Days and nights, Your Majesty, appear to the bright to be filled with light; Light being dark way out of sight.”