Quotes from John Knowles

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I was beginning to see that Phineas 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

The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary with age, enfeebled, dry. So more the things remain the same, the more they change after all. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed, I headed back though the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come out of the rain.

The winter loves me', he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, 'I mean as much as you can say a season can love. 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.' I didn't think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true. So I didn't argue.

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

What makes you so special? Why should you get it and all the rest of us be in the dark? The momentum of the argument abruptly broke from his control. His face froze. Because I've suffered, he burst out.

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

I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. "I believe you. It's okay because I understand and I believe you.

Let us pray. We all slumped immediately and unthinkingly in to the awkward crouch in which God was addressed.

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.

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

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.

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

I thought the issue was settled until at the end he said, 'Listen, pal, if I can't play sports, you're going to play them for me,' and I lost part of myself to him, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.

It was partly his doing. The Devon faculty had never before experienced a student who combined a calm ignorance of the rules with a winning urge to be good, who seemed to love the school truly and deeply, and never more than when he was breaking the regulations, a model boy who was most comfortable in the truant's corner. The faculty threw up its hands over Phineas, and so loosened its grip on all of us.

It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.

The war was and is reality for me.

I did not cry then or ever about Finney. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family's straightlaced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

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