Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn’t just the ’40s, either. In the ’30s and in the ’50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all- plus c’est la meme, plus ca change.

Gene, on the desire to be Finny: “I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.

I jounced the limb.

Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half.

Dr. Stanpole’s car was at the top of it, headlights on and motor running, empty. I idly considered stealing it, in the way that people idly consider many crimes it would be possible for them to commit.

You know what? I’m almost glad this war came along. It’s like a test, isn’t it, and only the things and the people who’ve been evolving the right way survive.

There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them.

Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I have not been able to identify its presence.

It wasn’t the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.