John Knowles

I stopped and looked at him up and down. He didn’t look directly back at me. “You’re too good to be true,” I said after a while

Then in the everyday, mediocre tone he used when he was proposing something really outrageous, he added, “Let’s go to the beach.”
The beach was hours away by bicycle, forbidden, completely out of all bounds. Going there risked expulsion, destroyed the studying I was going to do for an important test the next morning, blasted the reasonable amount of order I wanted to maintain in my life, and it also involved the kind of long, labored bicycle ride I hated. “All right,” I said

He gave me that half-smile of his, which had won him a thousand conflicts. “I’d kill myself out of jealous envy.”
I believed him

I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me

Most of all I cried because of kindness, which I had not expected

He wanted me around. The war then passed away from me, and dreams of enlistment and escape and a clean start lost their meaning for me

What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”

In a way,” deep in argument, his eyes never wavered from mine, “the whole world is on a Funny Farm now. But it’s only the fat old men who get the joke.”
“And you.”
“Yes, and me.”

He drew me increasingly away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all other friends, into a world inhabited by just himself and me, where there was no war at all, just Phineas and me alone among all the people of the world, training for the Olympics of 1944

The sun was doing antics among the million specks of dust hanging between us and casting a brilliant, unstable pool of light on the floor. “No one’s ever done anything like that before.”