ALL THE WAY DOWN

Some of my favorites from David Giffels' completely charming book ALL THE WAY DOWN, Building A Family In A Falling Down House:

* Realizing how little you actually know: that's the key to growing up.  Humility comes last, and never easily, and sometimes not at all.

* I was trying to understand us as a family even as we were actively changing...

* I had, as I always do in these situations, asked my dad if this was possible, and he had, as he generally does in response, done nothing to dampen my enthusiasm.  Anything's possible. This is what good fathers tell their children.

* Growing up is the process of imitating who you think you're becoming.

* She could have married for anything she wanted.  But she'd married for love, and this is the sort of sweet trouble that comes from that decision... it leads them into the thick of disorder with only each other to find a way out.

* An attic above, for the mind, and a cellar below, for the soul.

* There are few more deeply intimate relationship in human life than marriage.  A marriage is, after all, not two separate people coexisting, but rather one unit comprised of two formerly separate unites, just as water is something distinctly different from hydrogen and oxygen.

* If you give the wind a name, do you control it?  No.  Of course not.  This is the hubris of the human race.

* It's in the most mundane truths: that life goes on, that plans are for fools, that children grow up too fast.

* This is what it means to be a family; this is what it means to be home. To be complete in a place that will always be unfinished.