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 intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class. John Williams
Some Similar Quotes
  1. No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves it is the woman only who can make it a torment. - Jane Austen

  2. Language is the key to the heart of people. - Ahmed Deedat

  3. After all, tomorrow is another day! - Margaret Mitchell

  4. That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them! - Connie Willis

  5. Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly. - Matthew Quick

More Quotes By John Williams
  1. 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...

  2. 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 religion, toward which one ought to gaze...

  3. 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 that are not recorded in the annals of...

  4. Young people, " McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out."" Yes, sir, " Andrews said." Well, there's nothing, " McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in...

  5. 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 soon all that’s left is the brute,...

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