40 Quotes by Jonathan Lee

You wake up one day and realize you are a different person. That seems to be how life happens, how it establishes its patterns. The adult becomes a stranger to the boy he used to be. You become distant from everybody, especially yourself, even if, in the secrecy of your heart, you feel mostly unchanged.

The rich leapt over suspicious puddles in their beautiful clothes. Up and down they strolled, no discernible destination in mind, and that, he [Andrew Haswell Green] decided, must be a thing that money can buy: the freedom from needing direction.

All the best paintings made you see various levels of reality at once. They sent you inward as well as outward.

There may be mistakes in the choice of means to attain an end. But success or failure also involves much that lies beyond our power. We are not responsible for the inevitable, nor for a knowledge that is beyond our reach. Solely the ends, honestly chosen, and consistently sought, determine the moral quality of a life.

So yes, he could be funny. If you thought such things were funny. And the coffee had to be made with a specific number of beans. He could taste any errors in arithmetic.

There was no satisfying explanation for why Andrew [Haswell Green] and Samuel [Tilden] found themselves falling into a friendship. It was simply a matter of attraction, and instinct, and need, as it always is. Those factors and a hundred tiny, meaningless conversations that gradually accumulated into layers of familiarity.

Eighty-three years old. A lifetime of being a bachelor. This extended life of aloneness might have an effect on a man's character, might it not? Independence might have rusted into obstinacy.

A childhood never fully dies. Stories of life come up through cracks in the accounts, the spaces between death sentences, the pauses in obituaries, finding light and air to grow.

If you pay too much attention to time, in certain tedious moments, it slows down to punish you.