#stoner john williams

[elusivelogic]

"...love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another." - Stoner, John Williams

[justsomeguy-cassavetes]

this book is so butleycore btw. if yuo even care

[pressedstars-andflowers]

These are just things I’ve read that give me autumnal vibes - something melancholy, something that lingers a little while longer, something irrevocably and undeniably human.

Austen’s Persuasion or ‘95 film

Stoner by John Williams - quiet, understated, beautiful

Cormac McCarthys The Road - the prose is barren but my heart is full

Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep - I can’t stop thinking about this one description about the sun setting over the river; so simple, yet indescribably tender

Murakamis South of the Border, West of the Sun

Goodnight Mister Tom - a childhood favourite about healing

Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot - that poignant image of “sunlight on a broken column” but of course all of his works have this inexplicable melancholy to them

Thomas Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Sharingan Rising by @weialala-leia - a deep and nuanced take on grief and family

Anything by @blue-plums but perhaps a favourite - Go the Converse - imbued with a gentle yet unviolable hope

March Comes in Like a Lion - though the manga is lovely, the music and stunning graphics of the anime render it truly heartbreakingly sincere

Kiyo in Kyoto or the lovely live-action Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House - the small happiness of ordinary days

[sableuhfin]

I'm not strong enough for this book.

Currently reading Stoner to get through my fear of fail mariage

[caostalgia]

"En su año cuarenta y tres de vida, William Stoner aprendió lo que otros, mucho más jóvenes, habían aprendido antes que él: que el amor no es un fin sino un proceso a través del cual una persona intenta conocer a otra."

John William, Libro: Stoner

[everywarmth]

John Williams in John McGahern’s introduction to Stoner

[propertiesofjoy]

stoner, john williams

[seasurfacefullofclouds1]

Did Louis cheat on Eleanor or did she cheat on him? Who is he talking about on Headline?

1. Headline was 85% done when Louis got it.

2. FITF songs are a mixture of memory and imagination, not a literal transcript of Louis’ life.

3. My interpretation of Headline is that the significant other made assumptions about the singer, and never bothered to look beneath the surface. I don’t see any implication about cheating.

Favorite lyrics:

The varied meaning of the word “never” to mean: “noncommittal,” “indifferent,” “surprising,” and “definitely never again” is so clever and funny and sad, and it’s all there in three simple lines of lyric!

And you hear how the word “can’t” in “can’t forget you” has much more emotional weight than all the “never’s” because of the placement at the end of the line.

This is, of course, prefaced by the “forever” in the opening verse:

Such light, deft, elegant lyrical writing.

[kestrelsandcentipedes]

God I wish I could read Stoner by John Williams for the first time again

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[veilguards]

stoner, john williams

[smokefalls]

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

John Williams, Stoner

[hermitthrush]

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. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.

John Williams, Stoner (1965) | Chapter XIV

[abs0luteb4stard]

W 🎄 T C H I N G

[darkacademiacathedral]

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.

- Stoner, by John Williams