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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.

— John Knowles A Separate Peace (1959)

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Notes from Wikiquote

P. 191

More quotes by John Knowles

Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Naturally I don't believe books and I don't believe teachers, but I do believe-it's important for me to believe you [Gene]. Christ, I've got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Knowles (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.