Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.
Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.
Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.
Self-love seems so often unrequited.