A Separate Peace Quotes

“The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary from age, enfeebled, dry. I was thankful, very thankful that I had seen it. So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all—plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.”

Although they were old stairs, the worn moons in the middle of each step were not very deep. The marble must be unusually hard. That seemed very likely, only too likely, although with all my thought about these stairs this exceptional hardness had not occurred to me. It was surprising that I had overlooked that, that crucial fact

“Phineas was a poor deceiver, having had no practice.”

″‘We’d better hurry or we’ll be late for dinner,’ I said, breaking into what Finny called my “West Point stride.” Phineas didn’t really dislike West Point in particular or authority in general, but just considered authority the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction, the backboard which returned all the insults he threw at it.”

“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 […]. The faculty threw up its hands over Phineas, and so loosened its grip on all of us.”

“I noticed something about Finny’s own mind, which was such an opposite from mine. It wasn’t completely unleashed after all. I noticed that he did abide by certain rules, which he seemed to cast in the form of Commandments. ‘Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half’ was the first one I encountered.”

“My brief animosity, lasting only a second, a part of a second, something which came before I could recognize it and was gone before I knew it had possessed me, what was that in the midst of this holocaust?”

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?

″‘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, […] but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny’s: it should have been true. So I didn’t argue.”

“I did not cry then or ever about Finny. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family’s strait-laced 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.”

“None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or else because they could not understand it. I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way.”

“I felt better. Yes, I sensed it like the sweat of relief when nausea passes away; I felt better. We were even after all, even in enmity. The deadly rivalry was on both sides after all.”

“Finny turned toward me. “You were down at the bottom, weren’t you? he asked, not in the official courtroom tone he had used before, but in a friend’s voice.”

“Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn’t even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence.”

“Changed, I headed back through the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come in out of the rain.”

“Everything at Devon slowly changed and slowly harmonized with what had gone before. So it was logical to hope that since the buildings and the Deans and the curriculum could achieve this, I could achieve, perhaps unknowingly already had achieved, this growth and harmony myself.”

″‘You’ve been pretty lazy all along, haven’t you?’ ‘Yes, I guess I have been.’ ‘You didn’t even know anything about yourself.’ ‘I don’t guess I did, in a way.‘”

“I felt fear’s echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky.”

“There is no stage you comprehend better than the one you have just left.”

“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.”