"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 to know another."

John Williams Music See all quotes by John Williams →

React to this quote

More by John Williams

“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 with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Real love is to offer your life at the feet of another."

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

Literature1968

#love

"Islamic science came into being from a wedding between the spirit that issued from the Qur'anic revelation and the existing sciences of various civilizations which Islam inherited and which it transmu…"

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Philosophy1933

#philosophy

"The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

— Virginia Woolf

Literature1882–1941

#love

"New York prosecutors gave another description of Maxwell as they unveiled perjury charges against her on Thursday. “She set the trap,” federal prosecutor Audrey Strauss said of Maxwell’s alleged attem…"

— Ghislaine_Maxwell

1961

#art