Mankind in the aggregate I have found to be brutish, ignorant and unkind, whether those qualities were covered by the coarse tunic of the peasant of the white and purple toga of a senator. And...

It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the...

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering...

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 human race that are not military...

Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve.

It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned...

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...

Stoner and Masters smiled at each other, and they spoke no more of the question that evening. But for years afterward, at odd moments, Stoner remembered what Masters had said; and though it brought him...

…Mrs. Bostwick’s face was heavy and lethargic, without any strength or delicacy, and it bore the deep marks of what must have been a habitual dissatisfaction.

When he returned, Edith was in bed with the covers pulled to her chin, her face turned upward, her eyes closed, a thin frown creasing her forehead. Silently, as if she were asleep, Stoner undressed...

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure–as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such...

For my friends do not desert me, and life stays; for those two things I must be grateful.

But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain.

It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw himself as he must thus appear; and what Edith said was part of what...

Edith’s clothes were flung in disarray on the floor beside the bed, the covers of which had been thrown back carelessly; she lay naked and glistening under the light on the white unwrinkled sheet. Her...

What you seem so unwilling to accept, even now, is this: that the ideals which supported the old Republic had no correspondence to the fact of the old Republic; that the glorious word concealed the...

she seemed happy, though perhaps a bit desperately so

Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failutre that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two...

But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.

…a pessoa que amamos no início não é a mesma que amamos no fim, e que o amor não é uma meta e sim um processo através do qual uma pessoa tenta conhecer outra.

A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

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...

De repente, foi como se ela estivesse na sala ao lado e ele tivesse acabado de sair de junto dela. Sentiu um formigueiro nas mãos, como se lhe tivesse tocado. E a sensação de perda,...

But before [William Stoner] the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration. He...

A pessoa que amamos no início não é a mesma que amamos no fim, e que o amor não é uma meta e sim um processo através do qual uma pessoa tenta conhecer outra.

Na sua mocidade, Stoner imaginara o amor como um estado absoluto do ser ao qual uma pessoa, se tivesse sorte, podia aceder um dia; na idade adulta, decidira que era o paraíso de uma falsa...

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...

While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.

No seu quadragésimo terceiro ano de vida, William Stoner aprendeu o que outros, muito mais jovens do que ele, tinham aprendido antes de si: que a pessoa que amamos no início não é a mesma...

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...

Sometimes Edith came into the room and sat on the bed beside him and they talked. They talked of trivial things – of people they knew casually, of a new building going up on the...

The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby...