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This book is dedicated to the voices in my head, the most remarkable of my friends. And to my wife, who lives with us.
Older men rarely know what to say to younger men to let them know that they care. It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: ‘I can see you’re hurting.’
‘Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re for ever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.’
They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing.
It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at.
you can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.’
The estate agent takes a deep breath and says what women usually say to men who never seem to think that their lack of knowledge should get in the way of a confident opinion. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’
That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.
He sometimes thinks it’s impossible to know if children end up completely different despite the fact that they grew up together, or precisely because of that.
We lie to those we love.
Naturally, Jim did his best to act like he definitely had experience, seeing as dads like teaching their sons things, because the moment we can no longer do that is when they stop being our responsibility and we become theirs.
We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.
a viewing should make it look as if no one lives in the apartment, because otherwise only a serial killer would want to move in. A viewing should make it look as if anyone could potentially live there. People don’t want to buy a picture, they want to buy a frame.
Jack asked his mum one evening how she could bear to sit beside people when they were dying, in their final hours, without being able to save them. His mum kissed the top of his head and said: ‘How do you eat an elephant, sweetheart?’ He replied the way a child who’s heard the same joke a thousand times does: ‘One bit at a time, Mum.’ She laughed just as loudly, for the thousandth time, the way parents do. Then she held his hand tightly and said: ‘We can’t change the world, and a lot of the time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever
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They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.
