35 quotes found
Novelist · American
American novelist
“Why talk about something you can't do anything about?”
“Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.”
“Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.”
“I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.”
“There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding”
“Never say you are five feet nine whenyou are five feet eight and a half" was the first one I encountered.Another was, "Always say some prayers at night because it might turnout that there is a God.”
“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-...”
“In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day i entered it, was vibrantly real while i was a student the...”
“...his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. I believe you. Its okay because I understand and I believe you.”
“Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted...”
“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.”
“I had to be right in never talking about what you could not change, and I had to make many people agree that I was right. None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to ...”
“Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft and stricken, since he was by nature someone who ca...”
“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”
“My misery was too deep to speak any more. I scanned the page; I was having trouble breathing, as though the oxygen were leaving the room. Amid its devastation my mind flashed from thought to though...”
“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 whic...”
“...his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. “I believe you. It’s okay because I understand and I believe you.”
