"The friend of your youth is the only friend you’ll ever have. For he doesn’t really see you. He sees in his mind a face which doesn’t exist anymore, speaks a name… Spike, Bud, Red, Rusty… Jack… that belongs to that now nonexistent face. He’s still the young idealist you used to be, still sees good and bad in black and white and men as sinners or saints but never both and feels superior in the knowledge that you no longer can distinguish the two. That’s what drives you to it. To try to stick the knife in. There is a kind of snobbery in failure like the twist to the mouth of a drunk."

~Jack Burden, All The King’s Men, 2006