John Knowles - A Separate Peace (1959)

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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.

John Knowles
Peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.

John Knowles
There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.

John Knowles
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.

John Knowles
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.

John Knowles
I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

John Knowles
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.

John Knowles
Naturally I don't believe books and I don't believe teachers, but I do believe-it's important for me to believe you [Gene]. Christ, I've got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody.

John Knowles
Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come.

John Knowles
I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.

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

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

John Knowles
All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

John Knowles
Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

John Knowles
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.

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

John Knowles
Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It's all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you've got to be in a hurry. And when you're in a war you've got to be in a hurry. Don't you? So I guess maybe racing skiers weren't ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes... I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn't it, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive.

John Knowles
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.

John Knowles
I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend's shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.

John Knowles
Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.

John Knowles
He possessed an extra vigor, a heightened confidence in himself, a serene capacity for affection which saved him. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had.

John Knowles
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.

John Knowles
Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.

John Knowles
He [Finny] had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.

John Knowles
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.

John Knowles
This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way.

John Knowles
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.

John Knowles