Quotes by John Knowles

As a kid from a border state, I found the New Hampshire winter breathtakingly cold - for a while I didn't think I could breathe there at all - but I survived to return for the summer session of 1943.
– John Knowles
Exeter was, I suspect, more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives of almost anyone else who ever attended the school.
– John Knowles
Looking back, I think we were all quite mature, surprisingly responsible. In earlier wars, boys of our age had just gone off to raise hell or enlist or both, but we stayed dutifully at our desks doing tomorrow's homework.
– John Knowles
My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.
– John Knowles
Swimming isn't the most thrilling sport in the world, far from it; it's a damn bore most of the time, but it does make you healthy and gives you a good body. I finished first as the anchor man in the final, decisive relay against Andover, to become an athletic mini-hero for about 15 minutes.
– John Knowles
Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.
– John Knowles
The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.
– John Knowles
The novel has one peculiarity for a school novel: It never attacks the place; it isn't an expose; it doesn't show sadistic masters or depraved students, or use any of the other school-novel sensationalistic cliches. That's because I didn't experience things like that there.
– John Knowles
The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.
– John Knowles
There are simply more young people than there ever were. You get this feeling of strength. Also, large numbers can be a drawback, making it difficult to lose one's anonymity.
– John Knowles
We really did have a club whose members jumped from the branch of a very high tree into the river as initiation.
– John Knowles
Well, you know, there was the most enormous youth rebellion during the '30s. There was the Peace Pledge Union, which supposedly involved the cream of British youth. They thought wars were ridiculous and said just what everybody says today. They said they would not fight in any war.
– John Knowles
Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.
– John Knowles