“A man doesn't have time in his lifeto have time for everything.He doesn't have seasons enough to havea season for every purpose. EcclesiastesWas wrong about that.A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,to laugh and cry with the same eyes,with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,to make love in war and war in love.And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digestwhat history takes years and years to do.A man doesn't have time.When he loses he seeks, when he findshe forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loveshe begins to forget.And his soul is seasoned, his soulis very professional.Only his body remains foreveran amateur. It tries and it misses,gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains.He will die as figs die in autumn,Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,the leaves growing dry on the ground,the bare branches pointing to the placewhere there's time for everything. ”

“... a man doesn't like to have his ego popped, especially when he prides himself on his sagacity, and then to be proved wrong by a man who claims he doesn't know anything.”

“A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul.”

“A strong man doesn't have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn't match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches it against the world.”

“And when long years and seasons wheeling brought around that point of time ordained for him to make his passage homeward, trials and dangers, even so, attended him even in Ithaca, near those he loved.”

“Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.” Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.”