This Boy's Life Quotes
"Everything was going to change when we got out West."
"You didn’t need to be a mining engineer or a mineralogist. All you needed was a Geiger counter."
"I didn’t come to Utah to be the same boy I’d been before."
"I spun around. Sister James had been about to say something."
"I had to wait another ten years before learning this."
"In her presence my thoughtlessness forsook me."
"Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared."
"Our absorption was complete. We softened. We surrendered."
"No eye is quicker to detect that kind of effort than the eye of a competitor who also happens to be a child."
"Boys can’t wait for bikes, Rosemary. Boys need bikes now!"
"As if he knew that the odds of getting his hands on her were pathetically slim."
"We were never bored. We used our imaginations."
"There is absolutely no excuse for a kid to be bored, not in my book there isn’t."
"You can kill a man and get away with it. You just had to appear in the right role."
"I believed that Skipper should have taken me instead of Ray. I had asked first and, after all, I was his brother."
"Watching myself with revulsion, aghast at my own falsity yet somehow helpless to stop it, I simpered back at him."
"It was as good as decided. I saw myself riding shotgun beside Skipper in this fast, beautiful red car."
"I yielded easily to this comradely tone, forgetting while I did so that I was not the boy it supposed I was."
"I could see him as I wanted to see him. I could give him sterling qualities and imagine good reasons, even romantic reasons."
"When I got tired of this I went back to the car. By now I would be lonely myself, dying to talk."
"I had also learned that getting hit a few times wouldn’t kill me and that other people, even Dwight, would treat me with a certain deference for a few days after a fight."
"Dwight did not break down, but he was close to it."
"As we drove on I kept watching them. I was nervously alert, suspicious without knowing what I was suspicious of."
"I walked my paper route at glacial speed, the news bag swinging against my chest and back."
"I had provocation, and I had witnesses to carry the news. It seemed like a good time to make a point."
"I had never understood before, not really, what they did when they were off alone together."
"He tried to cheer me on with visions of everyone sitting together, a year or two down the line, eating these very nuts."
"I couldn’t help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions failed to persuade."
"I was my mother’s son. I could not be anyone else’s."
"I couldn’t get over Geoffrey’s audacity in writing it."
"I felt she knew all of me, all my foolishness and trouble."
"I thought she would be hurt by my wish to go, but she liked the idea."
"To seek status seemed the most natural thing in the world to me. Everyone did it."
"I did not want to be left out. Now that I had felt the possibility of this life, any other life would be an oppression."
"I believed that in some sense not factually verifiable I was a straight-A student."
"I could feel his exultation at the blow I’d struck, feel his own pride in it, see him smiling down at me with recognition, and pleasure, and something like love."
"Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain."
"I could not make myself move or speak. Just to stand there was all I could do."
"I was careful not to let my happiness show too much."
"I understood some of this and felt the rest."
"I knew that his mind was made up. So was mine. I had decided to join the army."
"I wanted a good life. The good life I had in mind for myself was just as conventional as the one I had in mind for myself, though without its epic pretensions."
"I actually wanted an answer. I told him I’d given the question serious thought and decided to go."
"I understood that I was being outfitted not for pleasure but for survival."
"These clothes were a finely nuanced language that the boys in my new world would read at a glance."
"He saw nothing to alarm him. He took a step forward, stuck his hands in his pockets, threw back his shoulders and cocked his head."
"It was good to find myself back in the clear life of uniforms and ranks and weapons."
"When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights."
"We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever."
"I did not know that the word home would forever after be filled with this place."
"We sang for all we were worth, as if we’d been saved."