" What was it, token of all our wordless and incongruent hunger that one saw here, that has never been expressed, that was so imminent, so exasperating, so impalpably near, as if the opiate of finality we had sought for our exacerbated nerves, the complete nurture we needed to stop the jaws of Cerberus was here almost within our grasp, an inch away from hope, a hand's breadth off from certainty. "

― Thomas Wolfe , The Good Child's River