A Separate Peace Quotes
"In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left."
"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."
"I felt fear’s echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky."
"Now here it was after all, preserved by some considerate hand with varnish and wax. Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well-known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn’t even known it was there."
"Everything at Devon slowly changed and slowly harmonized with what had gone before. So it was logical to hope that since the buildings and the Deans and the curriculum could achieve this, I could achieve, perhaps unknowingly already had achieved, this growth and harmony myself."
"I never got inured to the jumping. At every meeting, the limb seemed higher, thinner, the deeper water harder to reach. Every time, when I got myself into position to jump, I felt a flash of disbelief that I was doing anything so perilous. But I always jumped. Otherwise, I would have lost face with Phineas, and that would have been unthinkable."
"He was disgusted with that summer’s athletic program—a little tennis, some swimming, clumsy softball games, badminton. 'Badminton!' he exploded the day it entered the schedule."
"Phineas never permitted himself to realize that when you won they lost. That would have destroyed the perfect beauty which was sport. Nothing bad ever happened in sports; they were the absolute good."
"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."
"It was quite a compliment to me, as a matter of fact, to have such a person choose me for his best friend."
"I hope you're having a pretty good time here. I know I kind of dragged you away at the point of a gun, but after all you can't come to the shore with just anybody and you can't come by yourself, and at this teen-age period in life the proper person is your best pal."
"It was a courageous thing to say. Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide."
"You work too hard," Finny said, sitting opposite me at the table where we read. "You know all about History and English and French and everything else. What good will Trigonometry do you?"
"The effect of his injury on the masters seemed deeper than after other disasters I remembered there. It was as though they felt it was especially unfair that it should strike one of the sixteen-year-olds, one of the few young men who could be free and happy in the summer of 1942."
"He was too loyal to anything connected with himself—his roommate, his dormitory, his class, his school, outward in vastly expanded circles of loyalty until I couldn't imagine who would be excluded."
"But it didn't feel exactly as though I had done it for Phineas. It felt as though I had done it for myself."
"If you broke the rules, then they broke you."
"Sports are finished" he had been speaking of me. I didn’t trust myself in them, and I didn’t trust anyone else.
"Listen, pal, if I can’t play sports, you’re going to play them for me."
"I’m too busy for sports," and he went into his incoherent groans and jumbles of words.
"In our free democracy, even fighting for its life, the truth will out."
"Do you really think that the United States of America is in a state of war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?"
"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."
"You’ve been pretty lazy all along, haven’t you?"
"Games are all right in their place," he said, "and I won’t bore you with the Eton Playing Fields observation, but all exercise today is aimed of course at the approaching Waterloo. Keep that in your sights at all times, won’t you."
"No real war could draw Leper voluntarily away from his snails and beaver dams."
"Everything has to evolve or else it perishes."
"The natural state of things is coldness, and houses are fragile havens."
"I didn’t care what I said to him now; it was myself I was worried about."
"This was the only conflict he had ever believed in."
"You have to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with 'personality.'"
"With him, there was no conflict except between athletes, something Greek-inspired and Olympian in which victory would go to whoever was the strongest in body and heart."
"We didn’t find any in them. It was only that we could feel a deep and sincere difference between us and them."
"It was as though Athens and Sparta were trying to establish not just a truce but an alliance—although we were not as civilized as Athens and they were not as brave as Sparta."
"I don’t know," he shrugged and chuckled in his best manner, "nobody knows."
"Everything was all right," said Finny at the end, "phrasing, rhythm, all that. But I’m not sure about your pitch. Half a tone off, I would estimate offhand."
"Our helper He a-mid the floods," wafted out across the Common in the tempo of a football march, "Of mortal ills prevailing!"
"You see how Phineas limps," said Blinker loudly as we walked in.
"I’ve gotten awfully mad sometimes and almost forgotten what I was doing."
"I believe you. It’s okay because I understand and I believe you."
"I wish you hadn’t found out. What did you have to find out for!"
"It was just some kind of blind impulse you had in the tree there, you didn’t know what you were doing."