“He was perhaps a cynic, and his withers were unwrung at many of the misfortunes that affect men, but he had a peculiar feeling for youth, perhaps because it promised so much and lasted too short a time, and it seemed to him that there was in the bitterness it experience when reality breaks upon its illusions somehting more pathetic than in many graver ills.”
W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner