“Dad is looking at the bookshelves, deep in thought, deciding which book should go where. Once, Mom came home from work and discovered that he had turned all the books around so that the bindings were against the wall and the pages faced out. He said it was calming not to have all those words floating around and "creating static." Mom made him turn them back. She said it was too hard to find a book when she couldn't read the titles. Then she poured herself a big glass of wine.”

“Mom. She always says to look at the big picture. How all of the little things don't matter in the long run. . . I know that Mom is right about the big picture. But Dad is right too: Life is really just a bunch of nows, one after the other. The dots matter.”

“Mom's always telling me to smile and hoping I'll turn into a smiley person, which, to be honest, is kind of annoying.”

“Well, it's simple to love someone," she said. "But it's hard to know when you need to say it out loud.”

“Look, I know Mom talks about the big picture. She wants you to remember that you'll find new friends, that life is always changing, sometimes in really good ways. But life is also what's happening NOW, Georges. What Dallas and Carter are doing is happening NOW, and you can't just wait for it to be over. We have to do something about it. Now.”

“Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way. But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there's a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don't have to depend on the wind anymore.”

“so mom got the postcard today”