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

Peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me.

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart

It was hard to remember in the heavy and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.

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

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.

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.