You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him sing opera. - Richard Ford

Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. It's what you're willing to give up.

What's friendship's realest measure?
I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups.

Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away - live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else.
Explaining is where we all get into trouble.