He had never learned that the only things that matter are the ones you cannot.

There is a trap that money lays for people, and Arthur had walked all the way into it and lived his whole life at the bottom of it without ever seeing the walls.

The trap is this: money can buy so many of the outward signs of a good life, the comfortable house, the quiet respect, the appearance of being cared for, that a person can begin to believe it can buy the things themselves.

Arthur could purchase a visitor for his mother, and so he came to believe he had solved the problem of her loneliness, when all he had done was hide it from himself.