I am a boy; she is a married woman of middle years. I have the cynicism, and the purported understanding of life; though I am the idealist as well as the cynic, convinced that I have both the will and the power to mend things. And she? She is neither cynical nor idealistic; she lives without the mental clutter of theorising, and takes each circumstance and situation as it comes. She laughs at things, and sometimes that laughter is a way of not thinking, of avoiding obvious, painful truths. But at the same time I feel that she is closer to life than I am.
— The Only Story (Julian Barnes), Loc. 1067–71