It seems to me that all the things we keep in sealed boxes are both alive and dead until we open the box, that the unobserved is both there and not.

By the way, I've decided to start referring to myself exclusively as 'Daddy.' Everytime Daddy would otherwise say 'I' or 'Me,' Daddy is now going to say 'Daddy.

How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked. “Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

In those fifty, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I'd never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.

I can't remember, because I never knew.

The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.

You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it.