Quotes from A Separate Peace "I think we reminded them of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen....

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....We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction. Phineas was the essence of this careless peace." Chapter 2, pp. 16-17 "[Finny] 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." Chapter 2, pg. 18 "Between the buildings, elms curved so high that you ceased to remember their height....an untouched, unreachable world high in space, like the ornamental towers and spires of a great church....We seemed to be playing on the tame fringe of the last and greatest wilderness....Bombs in Central Europe were completely unreal to us here...." Chapter 2, pp. 22-23 "When you are sixteen, adults are slightly impressed and almost intimidated by you. This is a puzzle, finally solved by the realization that they foresee your military future, fighting for them. You do not foresee it....In such a period no one notices or rewards any achievements involving the body unless the result is to kill it or save it on the battlefield...." Chapter 3, pp. 33-34 "To keep silent about this amazing happening deepened the shock for me. It made Finny seem too unusual for -- not friendship, but too unusual for rivalry. And there were few relationships among us at Devon not based on rivalry." Chapter 3, pg. 37 "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." Chapter 3, pg. 40 "The beach shed its deadness and became a spectral gray-white, then more white than gray, and finally it was totally white and stainless, as pure as the shores of Eden. Phineas, still asleep...made me think of Lazarus, brought back to life by the touch of God." Chapter 4, pg. 41 "I found a single sustaining thought. The thought was, You and Phineas are even already. You are even in enmity. You are both coldly driving ahead for yourselves alone. You did hate him for breaking that school swimming record, but so what? He hated you for getting an A in every course but one last term. You would have had an A in that one except for him." Chapter 4, pg. 45 "It wasn't my neck, but my understanding which was menaced. [Finny] had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he." Chapter 4, pg. 51

A Separate Peace Quote Analysis Two

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wrists, the rich material against my skin excited a sense of strangeness and distinction; I felt like some nobleman, some Spanish grandee....[S]tanding there in Finny's triumphant shirt...I would never stumble through the confusions of my own character again." Chapter 5, pg. 62 "[There]...across the hall...where Leper Lepellier had dreamed his way through July and August amid sunshine and dust motes and windows through which the ivy had reached tentatively into the room, here Brinker Hadley had established his headquarters. Emissaries were already dropping in to confer with him." Chapter 6, pg.74 "I didn't trust myself in [sports], and I didn't trust anyone else. Pg. It was as though...boxers were in combat to the death, as though even a tennis ball might turn into a bullet. This didn't seem completely crazy imagination in 1942, when jumping out of trees stood for abandoning a torpedoed ship. Later, in the school swimming pool, we were given the second stage in that rehearsal: after you hit the water you made big splashes with your hands, to scatter the flaming oil which would be on the surface." Chapter 6, pp. 84 "I had never been in [the Naguamsett] before; it seemed appropriate that my baptism there had taken place on the first day of this winter session, and that I had been thrown into it, in the middle of a fight." Chapter 7, pg. 86 "In the same way the war, beginning almost humorously with announcements about [no more] maids and days spent at apple-picking, commenced its invasion of the school. The early snow was commandeered as its advance guard." Chapter 7, pg. 93 "To enlist. To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life -- that complex design I had been weaving since birth with all its dark threads...I yearned to take giant military shears to it, snap! bitten off in an instant....The war would be deadly all right. But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me...." Chapter 7, pg. 92 "[Up above] the cold Yankee stars ruled this night. They did not invoke in me thoughts of God, or sailing before the mast, or some great love as crowded night skies at home had done...." Chapter 7, pg. 93 "So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as it bore on us, overwhelming in its rush, seemingly inescapable, and then at the last moment eluded by a word from Phineas; I had simply ducked, that was all, and the wave's concentrated power had hurtled harmlessly overhead." Chapter 8, pg. 101