I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.

Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yard-stick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.

Hope...which is whispered from PAndora's box only after all the other plauges and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is onl time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion.

Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, apes become men. It's simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death.

The adventure of our first days together gradually blossomed into something else: a feeling I'd never had, which I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along.

A son is a promise that time makes to a man,the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him.

The two hardest things to contemplate in life ... are failure and age; those are one and the same.