But I didn’t turn up the best quote until college, when I read a short, heartbreaking essay by Tillie Olsen called “I Stand Here Ironing,” in which she writes of her oldest daughter: “She has much to her and probably little will come of it… Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom - but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by.”

Was there ever such a beautiful ode to lost potential?