Stoner

John Williams, 1965

194 and as he walked slowly through the evening, breathing the fragrance and tasting upon his tongue the sharp night-time air, it seemed to him that the moment he walked in was enough and the night not need a great deal more. Love is not an end, but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

'Lust and learning', Katherin once said. That's really all there is, isn't it?´

258 (After WWII) Innocent of fashion or customs, they came to their studies as Stoner had dreamed a student might - as if those studies were life itself and not specific means to specific ends.

268 He stood at the stairs that led up to the second floor; the steps were marble, and in their precise centres were gentle troughs worn smooth by decades of footsteps going up and down. They had been almost new when - how many years ago? He had first stood there and looked up, as he looked now, and wondered where they would lead him. He thought of time and of its gentle flowing. He put one foot carefully in the first smooth depression and lifted himself up.