I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.

As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.

The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.

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.

Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come.

But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.

I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.