A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

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. And if it wasn’t there, as for example with Phineas, then I put it there myself.

I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”

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.

It wasn’t the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.

Because 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.