Quotes
Quote 1: "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 that they are...shrunken by age....[for] the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way." Chapter 1, pg. 6
Quote 2: "Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed, I headed back through the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come in out of the rain." Chapter 1, pg. 6
Quote 3: "The tree tremendous, an irate, steely black steeple beside the river." Chapter 1, pg. 6
Quote 4: "What was I doing up here anyway? Why did I let Finny talk me into stupid things like this? Was he getting some kind of hold over me?" Chapter 1, pg. 9
Quote 5: "I think we reminded them of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen....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....We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction. Phineas was the essence of this careless peace." Chapter 2, pp. 16-17
Quote 6: "[Finny] could get away with anything. I couldn't help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little." Chapter 2, pg. 18
Quote 7: "Between the buildings, elms curved so high that you ceased to remember their height....an untouched, unreachable world high in space, like the ornamental towers and spires of a great church....We seemed to be playing on the tame fringe of the last and greatest wilderness....Bombs in Central Europe were completely unreal to us here...." Chapter 2, pp. 22-23
Quote 8: "When you are sixteen, adults are slightly impressed and almost intimidated by you. This is a puzzle, finally solved by the realization that they foresee your military future, fighting for them. You do not foresee it....In such a period no one notices or rewards any achievements involving the body unless the result is to kill it or save it on the battlefield...." Chapter 3, pp. 33-34
Quote 9: "To keep silent about this amazing happening deepened the shock for me. It made Finny seem too unusual for -- not friendship, but too unusual for rivalry. And there were few relationships among us at Devon not based on rivalry." Chapter 3, pg. 37
Quote 10: "I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth." Chapter 3, pg. 40
Quote 11: "The beach shed its deadness and became a spectral gray-white, then more white than gray, and finally it was totally white and stainless, as pure as the shores of Eden. Phineas, still asleep...made me think of Lazarus, brought back to life by the touch of God." Chapter 4, pg. 41
Quote 12: "I found a single sustaining thought. The thought was, You and Phineas are even already. You are even in enmity. You are both coldly driving ahead for yourselves alone. You did hate him for breaking that school swimming record, but so what? He hated you for getting an A in every course but one last term. You would have had an A in that one except for him." Chapter 4, pg. 45
Quote 13: "It wasn't my neck, but my understanding which was menaced. [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." Chapter 4, pg. 51
Quote 14: "Its high, somewhat stiff collar against my neck, the wide cuffs touching my wrists, the rich material against my skin excited a sense of strangeness and distinction; I felt like some nobleman, some Spanish grandee....[S]tanding there in Finny's triumphant shirt...I would never stumble through the confusions of my own character again." Chapter 5, pg. 54
Quote 15: "'You see! Kill me! Now you know what it is! I did it because I felt like that! Now you know yourself!'" Chapter 5, pg. 62
Quote 16: "[There]...across the hall...where Leper Lepellier had dreamed his way through July and August amid sunshine and dust motes and windows through which the ivy had reached tentatively into the room, here Brinker Hadley had established his headquarters. Emissaries were already dropping in to confer with him." Chapter 6, pg. 66
Quote 17: "I didn't trust myself in [sports], and I didn't trust anyone else. It was as though...boxers were in combat to the death, as though even a tennis ball might turn into a bullet. This didn't seem completely crazy imagination in 1942, when jumping out of trees stood for abandoning a torpedoed ship. Later, in the school swimming pool, we were given the second stage in that rehearsal: after you hit the water you made big splashes with your hands, to scatter the flaming oil which would be on the surface." Chapter 6, pp. 76-77
Quote 18: "I had never been in [the Naguamsett] before; it seemed appropriate that my baptism there had taken place on the first day of this winter session, and that I had been thrown into it, in the middle of a fight." Chapter 7, pg. 78
Quote 19: "In the same way the war, beginning almost humorously with announcements about [no more] maids and days spent at apple-picking, commenced its invasion of the school. The early snow was commandeered as its advance guard." Chapter 7, pg. 84
Quote 20: "To enlist. To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life -- that complex design I had been weaving since birth with all its dark threads...I yearned to take giant military shears to it, snap! bitten off in an instant....The war would be deadly all right. But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me...." Chapter 7, pg. 92
Quote 21: "[Up above] the cold Yankee stars ruled this night. They did not invoke in me thoughts of God, or sailing before the mast, or some great love as crowded night skies at home had done...." Chapter 7, pg. 93
Quote 22: "So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as it 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." Chapter 8, pg. 101
Quote 23: "But one day after our chaplain, Mr. Carhart, had become very moved by his own sermon in chapel about God in the Foxholes, I came away thinking that if Finny's opinion of the war was unreal, Mr. Carhart's was at least as unreal. But of course I didn't believe him." Chapter 8, pp. 110-11
Quote 24: "For hours, and sometimes for days, I fell without realizing it into the private explanation of the world....What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me. So I ceased to have any real sense of it." Chapter 9, pg. 115
Quote 25: "Winter's occupation seems to have conquered, overrun and destroyed everything, so that now there is no longer any resistance movement left in nature...and now winter itself, an old, corrupt, tired conqueror, loosens its grip on the desolation...sick of victory and enfeebled by the absence of challenge, it begins itself to withdraw from the ruined countryside." Chapter 9, pg. 120
Quote 26: "...for on this day even the schoolboy egotism of Devon was conjured away....It wasn't the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace." Chapter 9, pg. 128
Quote 27: "The sun was the blessing of the morning, the one celebrating element, an aesthete with no purpose except to shed radiance. Everything else was sharp and hard, but this Grecian sun evoked joy from every angularity and blurred with brightness the stiff face of the countryside. As I walked...the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck." Chapter 10, pg. 132
Quote 28: "'You always were a savage underneath. I always knew that only I never admitted it. But in the last few weeks...I admitted a hell of a lot to myself...It's you we happen to be talking about now. Like a savage underneath...like that time you knocked Finny out of the tree...Like that time you crippled him for life.'" Chapter 10, pg. 137
Quote 29: "[B]y now I no longer needed this vivid false identity; now I was acquiring, I felt, a sense of my own real authority and worth, I had had many new experiences and I was growing up." Chapter 11, pg. 148
Quote 30: "[There was] a beloved athletic coach none of us had ever heard of, a lady we could not identify -- her fortune had largely rebuilt the school; a nameless poet who was thought when under the school's protection to be destined primarily for future generations; a young hero now anonymous who looked theatrical in the First World War uniform in which he had died." Chapter 11, pg. 158
Quote 31: "'the sun was blazing all around them...and the rays of the sun were shooting past them, millions of rays shooting past them like -- like golden machine-gun fire....The two of them looked as black as -- as black as death standing up there with this fire burning all around them...[then] they moved like an engine.'" Chapter 11, pp. 166-67
Quote 32: "I heard the engine laboriously recede into the distance, and I continued to listen until not only had it ceased but my memory of how it sounded had also ceased. The light had gone out in the room and there was no sound coming from it. The only noise was the peculiarly bleak whistling of the wind through the upper branches." Chapter 12, pp. 175-76
Quote 33: "I knew what I said was important and right, and my voice found that full tone voices have when they are expressing something long-felt and long-understood and released at last....'You'd get things so scrambled up nobody would know who to fight any more. You'd make a mess, a terrible mess, Finny, out of the war.'" Chapter 12, pg. 182
Quote 34: "I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case." Chapter 12, pg. 186
Quote 35: "Peace lay on Devon like a blessing, the summer's peace, the reprieve, New Hampshire's response to all the cogitation and deadness of winter. There could be no urgency in work during such summers....Or perhaps that was only true for me and a few others, our gypsy band of the summer before." Chapter 13, pg. 189
Quote 36: "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." Chapter 13, pg. 193
Quote 37: "During the time I was with him, Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss. No one else I have ever met could do this....When [others] began to feel that there was this overwhelmingly hostile thing in the world with them, then the simplicity and unity of their characters broke and they were not the same again." Chapter 13, pg. 194
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