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Pity and love know little severance. One attends the other. (Chapter I)

Some day you will know that there is a beauty of the soul that is more important than worldly beauty. Remember this when you see worldly beauty.

If George Apley failed to meet certain challenges, let us admit that we all have failed in some respects, and let us remember that we stand together peculiarly as one large family. Collectively, in habits and ideals, our group is a family group where kinship, however distant, stretches into the oddest corners.

Nothing which is worth while is easy, nor in my experience is the actual doing of it particularly pleasant. The pleasure arises from completion and from the knowledge that one has done the right thing and has stood by one’s convictions.

love — that arbitrary and inexorable tyrant. (Chapter XII)

It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry.

This material change has made you all materialists, and yet it has rendered your grasp on reality uncertain. It has made you rely on the material gratification of the senses. It has made you worship Mammon and in this new material world everything comes too easily. Heat comes too easily and cold. Money comes too easily. Don’t forget that it will go as easily too. Romance comes too easily, and success. We have all grown soft from this ease. Position changes too easily. Values shift elusively. When everything is totalled up we have evolved a fine variety of flushing toilets but not a very good world.

In those days an Austrian district captain like Herr von Trotta would have been less shaken by the news of the sudden death of his only child than by the news of even a seemingly dishonorable action of that only child.

Herr von Trotta had always made a point of appearing richer than he was. He had the instincts of a true gentleman. And in those days (and perhaps in our day too) no instincts were more expensive than those. People favored with such curses do not know how much they possess or how much they spend. They draw from an invisible source. They never keep accounts. They assume that their wealth cannot lag behind their generosity.

For life became easy as soon as you drank. Oh, miracle of this borderland! It made life hard for a sober man, but whom did it leave sober?

There's a quote from The Poetics of Space that sticks with me. Professor Clarke wrote it on the board the last day of class.

It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality. -Gaston Bachelard

I've been thinking about this more lately, especially as I look back on my life. As much as we want to, we can't control time or keep it from moving forward. Maybe there's something beautiful about that, living with the uncertainty of what's to come. You never know what possibilities will be born out of it. But some things will always be certain. Like the sun rising in the morning. Or the leaves falling in the autumn and the cherry blossoms returning in the spring. That he and I will always be connected. And who knows? Maybe we'll see each other again in twenty-nine years, when the comet passes once more, sending streaks of light across the sky.

I hope he still remembers me then.

He calmly fell asleep, believing the worst was over. He did not know—old Herr Trotta—that fate was brewing bitter grief for him while he slept. He was old and tired, and death was already lurking, but life would not yet let him go. Like a cruel host it held him fast at the table because he had not yet tasted all the bitterness that had been prepared for him.