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.
I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.
There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding.
I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.
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.
Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.
Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.
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.
I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.
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.
I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn’t the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper’s snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.
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.
We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction.
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.
Someone made a long speech listing every infraction of the rules we were committing that night. Someone else made a speech showing how by careful planning we could break all the others before dawn.
Under the influence not I know of he hardest cider but of his own inner joy at life for a moment as it should be, as it was meant to be in his nature, Phineas recaptured that magic gift for existing primarily in space, one foot conceding briefly to gravity its rights before spinning him off again into the air. It was his wildest demonstration of himself, of himself in the kind of world he loved; it was his choreography of peace.
Times change, and wars change. But men don’t change, do they?
There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them.