John Knowles

“He was nodding his head, his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. “I believe you. It’s okay because I understand and I believe you. You’ve already shown me and I believe you.”

“I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.”

“I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.”

“You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it's the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment. Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over.”

“From my locker I collected my sneakers, jock strap, and gym pants and then turned away, leaving the door ajar for the first time, forlornly open and abandoned, the locker unlocked. This was more final than the moment when the Headmaster handed me my diploma. My schooling was over now.”

“Then for no reason at all, I felt magnificent. It was as though my body until that instant had simply been lazy as though the aches and exhaustion were all imagined, created from nothing in order to keep me from truly exerting myself. Now my body seemed at last to say, "Well, if you must have it, here!" and an accession of strength came flooding through me. Buoyed up, I forgot my usual feeling of routine self-pity when working out, I lost myself, oppressed mind along with aching body; all entanglements were shed, I broke into the clear.”

“So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as i bore on us, overwhelming in its rush, seemingly inescapable, and then at the last moment eluded by a word from Phineas; I had simply ducked, that was all,and the wave's concentrated power had hurtled harmlessly overhead, no doubt throwing others roughly up on th beach, but leaving me peaceably treading water as before. I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.”

“We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve. Anyway, they were more indulgent toward us than at any other time; they snapped at the heels of the seniors, driving and molding and arming them for the war. They noticed our games tolerantly. We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction.”

“Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I have not been able to identify its presence.”

“You can do more! A lot more. If you want a...record you can be proud of, you'll do a heck of a lot more than just what you have to.”

“Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.”

“...he's imagining himself Justice incarnate, balancing the scales. He's forgotten that Justice incarnate is not only balancing the scales but also blindfolded.”

“And sometimes you need too much to know the facts, and so humbly and stupidly you stay.”

“What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.”

“I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.”

“As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.”

“Last night as your breathingsettled into sleepwhat I heard was the half-forgotten sound,the velvet rush and hiss,the automatic clickas the record player's arm runs out,is brushed awayat the record's centre,the pulse of its subsidingoddly comforting.33 1/3 rpm.The knowledge that when the music ends,there will not be silence.”

“When you love something it loves you back in whatever way it has to love.”

“Je ne give a damn pas about le français, Les filles en France ne wear pas les pantelons”

“I think we reminded them of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen. We were registered with no draft board, we had taken no physical examinations. No one had ever tested us for hernia or color blindness. Trick knees and punctured eardrums were minor complaints and not yet disabilities which would separate a few from the fate of the rest. We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve. Anyway, they were more indulgent toward us than at any other time; they snapped at the heels of seniors, driving and molding and arming them for the war. They noticed our games tolerantly. We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction.”

“Everyone contributed to this legend except Phineas. At the outset, with the attempt on Hitler’s life, Finny had said, “If someone gave Leper a loaded gun and put it at Hitler’s temple, he’d miss.” There was a general shout of outrage, and then we recommended the building of Leper’s triumphal arch around Brinker’s keystone. Phineas took no part in it, and since little else was talked about in the Butt Room he soon stopped going there and stopped me from going as well—”How do you expect to be an athlete if you smoke like a forest fire?” He drew me increasingly away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all other friends, into a world inhabited by just himself and me, where there was no war at all, just Phineas and me alone among all the people of the world, training for the Olympics of 1944.”

“Most of the students there, he said, don't know what they think. You tell 'em, they'll think it. I plan to tell 'em.”

“But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.”

“There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding”

“Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.”

“Never say you are five feet nine whenyou are five feet eight and a half" was the first one I encountered.Another was, "Always say some prayers at night because it might turnout that there is a God.”

“I did not know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.”

“But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.”

“It was hard to remember in the heavy and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.”

“So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all—plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.”

“Someone knocked me down; I pushed Brinker over a small slope; someone was trying to tackle me from behind. Everywhere there was the smell of vitality in clothes, the vital something in wool and flannel and corduroy which spring releases. I had forgotten that this existed, this smell which instead of the first robin, or the first bud or leaf, means to me that spring has come. I had always welcomed vitality and energy and warmth radiating from thick and sturdy winter clothes. It made me happy, but I kept wondering about next spring, about whether khaki, or suntans or whatever the uniform of the season was, had this aura of promise in it. I felt fairly sure it didn't.”

“As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.”

“Must like the rest of us on the surface, he had an underlying obliging and considerate strain which barred him from being a really important member of the class. You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with "personality," and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas.”

“the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse”

“Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.”

“I saw on the pad not an operator's number from my home town, but one which seemed to interrupt the beating of my heart.”

“I turned with an inward groan to look at him. Quackenbush wasn't going to let me just do the work for him like the automaton I wished to be. We were going to have to be pitted against each other. It was easy enough now to see why. For Quackenbush had been systematically disliked since he first set foot in Devon, with careless, disinterested insults coming at him from the beginning, voting for and applauding the class leaders through years of attaining nothing he wanted for himself. I didn't want to add to his humiliations; I even sympathized with his trembling, goaded egotism he could no longer contain, the furious arrogance which sprang out now at the mere hint of opposition from someone he had at last found whom he could consider inferior to himself. I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn't the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper's snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.”

“As I had to do whenever I glimpsed this river, I thought of Phineas. Not of the tree and pain, but of one of his favorite tricks, Phineas in exaltation, balancing on one foot on the prow of a canoe like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured, body a complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all the others to maintain this supreme fantasy of achievement, his skin glowing from immersions, his whole body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might by gently pushing upward with his foot glide a little way higher and remain suspended in space, encompassing all the glory of the summer and offering it to the sky.”

“I jounced the limb.”

“Sarcasm... the protest of those who are weak.”

“So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.”

“It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart”

“The first person who says anything unpleasant will get a swift kick in the ass. ”

“What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”

“Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.”

“I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.”

“Is he using terror to keep away boredom? Does he have to try to destroy something? Even as a last resort, himself?”

“It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.”

“This is a school,' said Pete in his level voice. 'All views can be expressed and considered here. We're not indoctrinating you.' Yes, well,' Hochschwender replied coolly, 'that's a matter of point of view.”

“There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.”