John Knowles

"Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence."

"He [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."

"You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with personality, and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas."

"He possessed an extra vigor, a heightened confidence in himself, a serene capacity for affection which saved him. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had."

"Naturally I dont believe books and I dont believe teachers, but I do believe-its important for me to believe you [Gene]. Christ, Ive got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody."

"Now I see what racing skiing is all about. Its all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when youve got to be in a hurry. And when youre in a war youve got to be in a hurry. Dont you? So I guess maybe racing skiers werent ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. . . Im almost glad this war came along. Its like a test, isnt it, and only the things and the people whove been evolving the right way survive."

"I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas."

"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."

"Your war memories will be with you forever, youll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, dont get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come."

"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."

"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."