Important Quotations Explained
1. I
found it. 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. . . . I felt better.
Yes, I sensed it like the sweat of relief when nausea passes away;
I felt better. We were even after all, even in enmity. The deadly
rivalry was on both sides after all.
2. He 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. I couldn't stand this. . . . Holding firmly
to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and
I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around
to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he
tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the
bank with a sickening, unnatural thud. It was the first clumsy physical
action I had ever seen him make. With unthinking sureness I moved
out on the limb and jumped into the river, every trace of my fear
of this forgotten.
3. “Listen, pal,
if I can't play sports, you're going to play them for me,” and 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.
4. Fear seized my
stomach like a cramp. I didn't care what I said to him now; it was
myself I was worried about. For if Leper was psycho it was the army
which had done it to him, and I and all of us were on the brink
of the army.
5. I never killed
anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the
enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was
on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there. Only
Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone.
