A Separate Peace

p. 45

Gene Forrester (age 16) speaks: “It was hard to remember when one summer day after another broke with a cool effulgence over us, and there was a breath of widening life in the morning air–something hard to describe–an oxygen intoxicant, a shining northern paganism, some odor, some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back in my bed on guard against it. It was hard to remember in the heady and sensual clarity of those 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 those mornings were too full of beauty for me . . . .”