To marry, to establish a family, to take on all the children that might come along, to look after them and perhaps even guide them is, I am convinced, the highest thing anyone can ever achieve. That so many appear to achieve it easily is not evidence to the contrary, for in the first place not many really achieve it, and secondly these few often don't 'do' it - it just happens to them. This may not be the 'highest thing' I mentioned, but it is still something great and most honorable (especially because there is no clear distinction between 'doing something' and 'something happening to you'). And finally, it's not a matter of actually achieving this 'highest thing' at all, but only of aiming at some distant but decent approximation to it; we don't have to fly straight into the sun, but we do need to creep into some tidy little place on earth where the sun sometimes shines and where we can find a little warmth for ourselves.

Letter to my father by Franz Kafka