Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened h… - Richard Ford

Don't let what your parents do disappoint you.

And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned — even the people who love you — and that is all right. It can be lived with.

(My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything — a marriage, a conversation, a government — as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.)