“I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.”

“I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us.”

“Nothing about these times makes any sense. Nothing. Putting it to words only makes it sound too simple.”

“All of us have parents. Generations pass. We are not unique. Now it is our family's turn.”

“My parents have lived longer than most and have expected very little. We have been blessed in too many ways to count.”

“Life does find a way to create a balance somewhere between smiles and tears. And, like a pendulum's swing, life seldom stays in one place. Life keeps on moving until, one day, it stops.”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

“In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--w...”

“We are respecting our parents' wishes....They didn't want to shelter us from the world's treacheries. They wanted us to survive them.”

“We are respecting our parents' wishes....They didn't want to shelter us from the world's treacheries. They wanted us to survive them.”