The dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of childhood became the self-evident norms of adulthood.

‘We don’t have a right thing, just a plateful of a little less wrong.’”

“You are the central fact of my life,” he said. “Knowing you. Waking up next to you. It’s been the most meaningful thing I’ve done. And

I am profoundly fucking grateful that I got that. I think of how easy it would have been for us to miss each other, and I can’t even imagine what that lifetime would have been.”

“We’re scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we’re wrong.”

The dead were still around him, because he couldn’t bring himself to believe that they weren’t. He could know it. He could understand. But like a kid who’d lost something precious, he’d never been able to shake that sense that maybe, just maybe, if he looked again, it would be there. Maybe the people he loved weren’t gone forever.

Like the number of minutes in an hour, the width of a centimeter, the volume of a liter, the length of a year was the marker by which humanity told the story of itself.

“Or maybe,” Amos said, “you’re not that important and it ain’t up to you to fix the universe?”

insouciant