John Knowles Quotes

For tea she went down to see Misses Spink and Forcible. She had three digestive biscuits, a glass of limeade, and a cup of weak tea. The limeade was very interesting. It didn't taste anything like limes. It tasted bright green and vaguely chemical. Coraline liked it enormously. She wished they had it at home. "How are your dear mother and father?" asked Miss Spink. "Missing," said Coraline. "I haven't seen either of them since yesterday. I'm on my own. I think I've probably become a single child family.

The loneliness is when you pick up and move, even if you are not originally from that place, and you have some memories that you want to embrace. Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

I loved every minute of my childhood - sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand... Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

Being sent away to school was no different from my biological mother giving me away.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

I didn't have an incredibly active social life as a teenager. I always wished it was a little bit more exciting than it was.

When I was a kid, I was so homesick at all times.

as a child i suppose i was not quite normal. my happiest times were when i was left alone in the house on a saturday.

There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!

There is something in this native land business and you cannot get away from it, in peace time you do not seem to notice it much particularly when you live in foreign parts but when there is a war and you are all alone and completely cut off from knowing about your country well then there it is, your native land is your native land, it certainly is.

For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.

I'm like a child who belongs to nobody.

I always felt a bit alone and isolated from other people...I did a lot of pretending as a child. It was my way of coping with the fact that I didn't feel like I fit in.

I lay my head on the railroad track, waitin' on the Double E. But the train don't run by here no more, poor, poor, pitiful me.

In some way impossible to ascertain, after so many years of absense, Jose Arcadio was still an autumnal child, terribly sad and solitary.

I was kind of sweet kid, according my mother, and my recollections. Thoughtful and good, but kind of alone - although I didn't interpret it that way, as such. Children never interpret these things. They think they understand logically.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.

It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.

I have been a stranger in a foreign land.

I hate this feeling. Like I'm here, but I'm not. Like someone cares. But they don't. Like I belong somewhere else, anywhere but here, and escape lies just past that snowy window, cool and crisp as the February air.

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.

I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there... I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity... Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then.