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 pessoa que amamos no fim, e que o amor não é uma meta e ...
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, que durante tanto tempo contivera dentro do si, jorrou em torrent...
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 religião, que uma pessoa devia encarar com uma divertida inc...
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 campus, of an old one torn down; but what they said did not seem to ma...
...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.
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.
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 thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.
Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve.
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 he saw. He had a glimpse of a figure that flitted through smoking-room anecdotes, and...
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 thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered a...
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 saw it as the great University library, to which ne...
But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.
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 had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was...
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 body was lax and wanton in its naked sprawl, an...
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 no vision of the University to which he had comm...
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 k...
While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.
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 and got into bed beside her. For several moments he ...
