“The best is when we all go at once, like an army of interrelated popcorn zombies who laugh the same laughs and gasp the same gasps and aren’t so germ-phobic with each other that we won’t share a ginormous Coke with one straw. Family is useful like that.”

“I read somewhere once that soulmates are simply two people who recognize the damage in each other but the truth is that there's a lot more to it than that. Sometimes, I used to joke with Ashling that we were like Elliot and E.T. because most of the time we thought the same thoughts and we felt the same emotions. Ashling would laugh and say that as long as she could be Elliot, she wouldn't argue with me.”

“We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?”

“Often we may even smile or laugh at adversity, but all people share the same passions. They are merely manifest differently according to one's culture and conditioning.”

“We're human. We all occasionally wet ourselves. No one is really better than anyone else. We're just all trying to make it through the year as best we can. We screw up sometimes. We succeed sometimes. We laugh. We cry. We go on. Those are the things we should really share with each other this holiday season, right, if we dare send a letter? We should share the truth. We should share the insanity.”

“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.”