"Jeb is going to grow up to be the kind of man who spends his Saturdays teaching his little boy to ride a bike. (...) Charlie, on the other hand, will be off playing golf while his kid kills people on his Xbox. Charlie will be dashing and debonair, and he'll buy his kid all kinds of crap, but he'll never actually be there."

"I came running down the stairs that morning, like it was Christmas. My parents were already up. In my family, presents never waited; they were there upon waking. Our family has a problem with what they called delayed gratification. We want what we want when we want it, and we always want it now."

"The table was covered with food like roast chicken, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, roast turkey, roast liquorice and, the centrepiece, a roasted knight."

"These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance."

"So I'll send my parents money, and maybe they can get a bigger place, too. They can even relax when they're older, the way they deserve to. Without having to worry about how they're going to survive. But for now, I'm the one who has to survive."

"It used to upset me - now it makes me sad - to see people use patriotism and our troops as a pawn in their political argument. Because I know personally, growing up in a military family, the sacrifice that is made on a daily basis."

"Ruth once wrote, “Dear Journal, Never let a single day pass without saying an encouraging word to each child . . .‘More people fail for lack of encouragement,’ someone wrote, ‘than for any other reason."

"Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely."

"Listen, ah don't wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that - a great whopping whale of a hog's cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain."

"If her mother had been observing this interaction, she'd tell Clementine she was wrong, that she needed to keep talking, to say everything that was on her mind, to communicate, to leave no possibility for misinterpretation.If her father were here, he'd put his finger to his lips and say, 'Shh.'Clementine settled for two words.'I'm sorry,' she said."