Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument — that, friends, is real wisdom. - Saul Bellow

She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.

He wondered at times whether he didn’t belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate; in return for docility or ingenuous good will they were to be shielded from the worst brutalities in life.

And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.