“You've become a clever man.”

“You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?”

“It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.”

“After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble. ”

“One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them.”

“Straight Man: "But my daughter belongs to a talk show generation that seems to be losing the ability to discriminate between public and private woes.”

“One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.”