A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

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.

Everything at Devon slowly changed and slowly harmonized with what had gone before.

This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age.

We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve.

It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.

When you are sixteen, adults are slightly impressed and almost intimidated by you.

There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them.

Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

It struck me then that I was injuring him again. It occurred to me that this could be an even deeper injury than what I had done before.

If you broke the rules, then they broke you. That, I think, was the real point of the sermon on this first morning.