“He (Finny) never had 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 chose this quote because I think that it is a defining moment for Gene.  This is when Gene realizes that he is of much lesser quality than Finny and becomes ashamed of himself.  This is also the moment that Gene begins to morph into the kind of  “Hyde” character that he becomes, a morose shell of his previous self, and the readers are able to see that Gene is the real antagonist, not 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.”

This quote was significant to me because I felt that it was a direct manifestation of the overall theme for the entirety of the book’s first half.  Gene would always strive to be just like Finny, whether or not he did it intentionally, and I believe that this is a point that it is easy to see just how utterly obsessed with his ideology Gene actually is.

   “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.”

This quote is one that i really like because i think that this is the last thing that leper says before he goes insane and I also feel that this misconstrued image of the ski troops is what causes leper to have his issues later.  Had he stayed true to his mild-mannered, nature-loving character, he wouldn’t have been so whack-a-doodle.

“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.”

This is a quote that describes Finny perfectly.  I mean, to-a-tee.  Finny was the most confident and outgoing character in the book, by far, but he was not arrogant.  His world was just a purity.  His happiness was incorruptibly blissful, for a while, anyway.

“Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. . .”

When leper says this, it is obviously ominous to those whom have previously read the book, but not those who are in the process   I think this is rather ironic.  Leper literally does the exact opposite of what he says.  He literally devolves into a psychotic weirdo.

“Naturally I don’t believe books and I don’t believe teachers, but I do believe-it’s important for me to believe you.”

This is a quote I chose simply because it makes me want to cry.  It’s just so depressing that, even after Finny says this, gene continues to be a jerk-wad.  I must feel really bad for Finny.  Poor kid…

 “Your war memories will be with you forever,”

This quote is ridiculously ironic.  The war was not even what Gene really remembered, but the war within himself that eventually killed his best friend.  Gene could not care less about the war, but his experience and immense guilt with Finny is something that will never leave him.

“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.”

This is significant because while the boys were stuck shoveling snow, they were also trapped in their own adolescence.  Some of them wanted to be out in the actual world, and some simply wanted to forget the war all together.  The fact that they were children restricted the boys from doing as they wished with their lives, as it continues to do today in society.

“I should have told him then that he was my best friend also…But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.”

This quote helps illustrate Gene’s insecurity and awkwardness.  Not only is he extremely conscious of what his other friends would say if he expressed emotion towards Finny, but I believe that he also does not exactly know how to express intimate emotions.  Oh, also, he’s crazy.

“You always were a savage underneath…like that time when you knocked Finny out of the tree.”

I think that this goes to show just exactly how flipping CRAY Leper got towards the end of the book.  He was originally a mild-mannered, quiet boy who was content with just his nature and skiing until he went off to war.  Leper then became insane and proved this by blackmailing Gene.