van

“I thought the issue was settled until at the end he said, 'Listen, pal, if I can't play sports, you're going to play them for me,' and I lost part of myself to him, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“You're still wearing it."
He couldn't help but say it. Laurent's wrist was heavy with gold, like the colour of his hair in the firelight.
"So are you."
"Tell me why."
"You know why," said Laurent.”
― C.S. Pacat, Kings Rising

“The last words of Finny's usual nighttime monologue were, 'I hope you're having a pretty good time here. I know I kind of dragged you away at the point of a gun, but after all you can't come to the shore with just anybody and you can't come by yourself, and at this teen-age period in life the proper person is your best pal.' He hesitated and then added, 'which is what you are,' and there was silence on his dune.
It was a courageous thing to say. Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by the level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Now, in this winter of snow and crutches with Phineas, I begin to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk. Phineas however did not believe this. I’m sure that he looked down at his leg every morning first thing, as soon as he remembered it, to see if it had not been totally restored while he slept. When he found on this first morning back at Devon that it happened still to be crippled and in a cast, he said in his usual self-contained way, “Hand me my crutches, will you?”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace