A Separate Peace

by John Knowles

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. In this double demotion the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way.

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.

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.

Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.