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Jonathan Lee Quotes

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All Age Aloneness Death Absence Bachelorhood Character Childhood Dying Failure Fear Of People

Famous Jonathan Lee Quotes

“The real cruelty of dying was not the way your own obscene dreams went gray. It was the fact that you lost the chance to tell your story.”

Dying

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“Love. This was the way not to fall into forgetting. Love, and a good publicist.”

Love History Forgetting Public Relations

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“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.”

Character Age Independence Aloneness Obstinacy Bachelorhood

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“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.”

Freedom Money Rich Vs Poor Lack Of Direction

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“At the age of eighty-three he had the self-awareness necessary to be patient with other people, but not always the facility to disguise the effort.”

Patience Self Awareness Old Age Patience Quotes

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“He [Andrew Haswell Green] wanted to say, Don't go, but he still did not know how. To open himself up to a hard, hurtful truth again seemed the very worst of options. Some people are perhaps meant to live alone.”

Isolation Aloneness Self Exposure

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“Mother died when he was twelve. He did not want sympathy, he only wanted her back.”

Parents Grief And Loss Sympathy

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“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.”

Life Stories Death Childhood

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“A man dies at twenty and it is a great shame. He dies at thirty or forty and he has been taken from us too soon. But if one reaches the age of eighty-three, all the shock eventually begins to flow the other way, even in a murder case. The chief question becomes: How on earth did he survive so long?”

Age Death

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“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.”

Success Failure Moral Life

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“Andrew [Haswell Green]...thought of his impending travel on the brig. Of Samuel Tilden. Of why the friendship had vanished, the errors he must have made, too many signs of affection, or of desperation, neediness, the most appalling of all impressions to make on a fellow man. His only available course now was to put distance between his failures and his future, tighten the stranglehold on his feelings, and harden his heart protectively against the pain of further great mistakes.”

Self Protection Loss Of Friendship

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake

“At a certain age we forget to be afraid of people. We start to dread, instead, their absence.”

Absence Fear Of People

Book:The Great Mistake

Source: The Great Mistake