I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

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 they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way.

Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse

As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.

I saw on the pad not an operator's number from my home town, but one which seemed to interrupt the beating of my heart.

Must like the rest of us on the surface, he had an underlying obliging and considerate strain which barred him from being a really important member of the class. You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with "personality," and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas.

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.