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| f growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult | From Mayas persspective as a 6 year old Maya wrote this expressing her displacement and hopstility towards her parents and peers. She feels that she is a nobody who cannot impact the world. |
| A light shade had been pulled down between the Black community and all things white, but one could see through it enough to develop a fear-admiration-contempt for the white “things”—white folks' cars and white glistening houses and their children and their women. But above all, their wealth that allowed them to waste was the most enviable. | Maya expresses in her writing that she feels once again as if she has no importance in the world. She seems to have no rights and expresses her somewhat hatred towards whites and also expresses how bad her situation is. |
| My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. . . . This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than the apes. | Maya, although in a terrible situation and community saw hope in her life. Her expression of Joe Lewis's importance to the black community portrays this hope. If LEwis were to win only good would come for the colored community. They would gain respect they longed for and very well deserved. |
| Bailey was talking so fast he forgot to stutter, he forgot to scratch his head and clean his fingernails with his teeth. He was away in a mystery, locked in the enigma that young Southern Black boys start to unravel, start to try to unravel, from seven years old to death. The humorless puzzle of inequality and hate | Bailey reels from having encountered a dead, rotting black man and having witnessed a white man's lighthearted satisfaction of seeing the body. Bailey cannot comprehend the degree of hatred. This section draws attention to the idea that Bailey's life depended upon him not understanding or attempting to understand how racism operates against black men. |
| The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. | addresses why black women have strength of character. Maya says that most of the strong black women in her novel are “survivors.” They have strong characters quite simply because they have survived against impossible odds. Therefore, they obviously show heroism, courage, and strength. Moreover, Maya states that the odds pitted against black women include not only the triple threat of sexism, racism, and black powerlessness, but also the simultaneous presence of “common forces of nature” that assault and confuse all children. |
| 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. | Gene feels as if he is competing with Finny. He tries hard tospite Finny who drives Gene into acedemic excelence. But in the end Gene discovers the truth that Finny has never been competitive which sinks Gene into more jealousy, that Finny is morally superior as well. |
| 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. | Ås a result of Genes jealousy of Finny's superiority Gene loses control of himself and ends up shooting himself and in the foot while taking Finny down as well. Gene could not handle the truth and comprehend the truth. EVeryone was like himself in his mind and he could not understand otherwise. |
| 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. | Finny stated this because he had loast a major part of his life as a result to Gene. So he decides that Gene and Finny wil become one and part of each other. |
| 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. | Finny says this when he finally realises that the war is indeed real. "Only a war could make someone so stable turn around the block and lose their minds to insanity. |
| 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. | Phineas had become a part of Gene. Gene had killed his enemy indeed, his enemy ws himself; he killed part of himself that was greater than any other. |
| "He possessed an extra vigor, a heightened confidence in himself, a serene capacity for affection which saved him. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had | Gene describes how he destroyed an almost perfect persons natural unity. He had destroyed himself and fed off of Finny's strength |
| Gene, on the desire to be Finny: "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" | s |
| Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It's all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you've got to be in a hurry. And when you're in a war you've got to be in a hurry. Don't you? So I guess maybe racing skiers weren't ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. . . I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn't it, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive" | f |
| Gene, on the war activities around Devon: "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" | g |
| "You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with 'personality,' and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas" | h |
| "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" | j |
| Mr. Hadley on war: "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" | k |
| Gene, on war: "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" | l |
| Gene, on the enemy: "All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy" | u |
