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...

Someone knocked me down; I pushed Brinker over a small slope; someone was trying to tackle me from behind. Everywhere there was the smell of vitality in clothes, the vital something in wool and flannel...

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...

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

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...

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 believe you. It’s okay because I understand and I believe you.

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...

Now here it was after all, preserved by some considerate hand with varnisch and wax. Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

It is a sad day when one looks back and sees that his largest regrets have become some of the most integral elements of his dreams.

I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time...