John Knowles

I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

Why talk about something you can't do anything about?

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-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

Teenagers today are more free to be themselves and to accept themselves.

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.

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 thought, despairingly in search of something left which it could rely on. Not rely on absolutely, that was obliterated as a possibility, just rely on a little,some solace, something surviving in the ruin.

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

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 carried others. I didn't think he knew how to act or even how to feel as the object of help.

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 Phineas, either because they could not believe it or 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.

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.

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 there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left

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 only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.

...his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. __ believe you. It__ okay because I understand and I believe you.

There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding