Stoner

“And do you intend to return to the farm after you receive your degree here?” “No, sir,” Stoner said, and the decisiveness of his voice surprised him. He thought with some wonder of the decision he had suddenly made.

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.

Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force. She learned tha

Then she turned again to her daughter. “I am different, I believe,” she said to her. “I really believe I am.” But William Stoner knew that she was speaking to him. And at that moment, somehow, he also knew that beyond her intention or understanding, unknown to herself, Edith was trying to announce to him a new declaration of war.

Her parents behaved toward each other with a distant courtesy; Edith never saw pass between them the spontaneous warmth of either anger or love. Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment.

They returned to Columbia two days earlier than they had planned; restless and strained by their isolation, it was as if they walked together in a prison.

she had never been alone to care for her own self one day of her life, nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the well-being of another.

He felt a distant closeness to her, and a pity for her helplessness; desire thickened in his throat so that he could not speak.

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.