Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God.
Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.
As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.
Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.
It is a sad day when one looks back and sees that his largest regrets have become some of the most integral elements of his dreams.
Life is fighting. In life, it’s the look ahead that counts. We are all born equally far from the sun. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.
All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.
We are all born equally far from the sun.
It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.
I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.
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.
The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.
Sarcasm is the protest of the weak.
Peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.
There are simply more young people than there ever were. You get this feeling of strength. Also, large numbers can be a drawback, making it difficult to lose one’s anonymity.
The next major advance in the health of the American people will be determined by what the individual is willing to do for himself.
My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.
Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn’t just the ’40s, either. In the ’30s and in the ’50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.
Exeter was, I suspect, more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives of almost anyone else who ever attended the school.
The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.