The only things people can ever know about you are the ones that you let them see

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.

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.

Adulthood it a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.

Love lost is a special kind of failure, I think. It's a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come; that some apes will never be men, not in all the world's ages.

Two people who think they're in love can find out, when left alone, exactly how little they know about each other.