“What Douglas had once seen as the attractive over-confidence of youth, now looked more like unyielding selfishness.”

“There is nothing more attractive than confidence, once she sees her own beauty, everyone else will.”

“The manner of his life was of no importance. What affected her was that he had once been young. That he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all. Youth and vigour had come to that. Youth and vigour always came to that. Everything came to that.”

“When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say "more perfect" because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.”

“Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked.”

“Now looking across my latte at this confident smiling Starbucks employee I felt sorry for myself. She seemed carefree to me so young so full of options. Later I would learn that she had seen more hardship in her life than I could conceive of having seen in three lifetimes.”