...меня не оставляли мысли о выборе, который вынуждены делать люди. О том, что всегда и всюду нам приходится выбирать. То или другое. Пойти поиграть или остаться дома.

- 'The teacher wanted us to write what we thought the meaning of life was once.'

• 'What did you write'
• 'Company'.
• 'That's the best answer I heard.'
• 'My teacher said I had to write a longer answer.
• 'So what did you do?'
• 'I wrote: Company. And ice cream.'

• 'What kind of ice cream?'

It's an awful thing to miss somebody who is still here.

It’s bloody awful to admit to yourself that you’re not the kind of person you’ve always thought you were.

You were always someone who could be happy. You don’t know how much of a blessing that is.

You despise me now, because I’ve devoted all my seconds to my work. But I have, at least, devoted them to something. What have your friends’ parents devoted their lives to? Barbecues and rounds of golf? Charter holidays and TV shows? What will they leave behind?

Maybe everyone feels that way about their hometown: the place we’re from never apologizes, never admits that it was wrong about us. It just sits there, at the end of the motorway, whispering: “You might be all rich and powerful now. And maybe you do come home with expensive watches and fancy clothes. But you can’t fool me, because I know who you really are. You’re just a scared little boy.

‘Ted, we’re not going into space because we’re afraid of aliens. We’re going because we’re scared we’re alone. It’s an awfully big universe to be alone in.’”

“Noahnoah, promise me something, one very last thing: once your good-bye is perfect, you have to leave me and not look back. Live your life. It’s an awful thing to miss someone who’s still here.”

“If I forget the funeral I’ll forget why I can’t ever forget her.”

“Do you remember what you said, when we first fell in love, that sleeping was a torment?”
“Yes. Because we couldn’t share our sleep. Every morning when I blinked awake, the seconds before I knew where I was were unbearable. Until I knew where you were.”

“You were never easy, darling difficult sulky you, never diplomatic. You might even have been easy to dislike at times. But no one, absolutely no one, would dare tell me you were hard to love.”

“My memories are running away from me, my love, like when you try to separate oil and water. I’m constantly reading a book with a missing page, and it’s always the most important one.”

“You never had time to teach me, Dad. You were always working. But you taught Noah, you’ve taught him everything.

“What do I say to Noah? How do I explain that I’m going to be leaving him even before I die?”

“We had too little time,” he says. She shakes her head. “We had an eternity. Children and grandchildren.”“I only had you for the blink of an eye,” he says. She laughs. “You had me an entire lifetime. All of mine.”“That wasn’t enough.”

Grandma said it wasn’t suitable to give newborn children dragons as cuddly toys and Grandpa said he didn’t want a suitable grandson.

Grandpa loves trees, because trees don’t give a damn what people think.

His grandpa is next to him and is incredibly old, of course, so old now that people have given up and no longer nag him to start acting like an adult. So old that it’s too late to grow up. It’s not so bad either, that age.