Home is wherever I'm with you
"We had an orange tree when we were kids. My dad was really proud of it. He planted it one spring, and he used to go out there first thing every morning, see if any oranges had grown. But nothing ever grew. The thing was sickly or something, or the soil wasn't right. One morning, my mom woke Grace and me up really early like at 5 o'clock and she led us out to the tree with these two grocery bags filled with oranges, and pineapples and grapes and melons for some reason. And we just hung all the fruit from the tree using tape and string. It worked, actually. And then we all ran into the truck and slouched down and just waited for my dad to come out. He stared at it for a full minute just staring at it. I think at first he thought they were real, like the tree had burst into fruit overnight, and then, I guess he saw the pineapples or something, and he just started laughing harder than we'd ever heard him laugh. And Grace and I just ran out of the truck, squealing. And my mom just... And from then on, every once in a while one of us would hang fruit from there. Usually something plastic, like pears or strawberries or bananas."
"The wedding was good, marriage was great, but what you need to be happy, and sane, is this. Here's you two guys. Okay, so you kiss, you do other things and then you make a baby. The baby comes in there and he nestles in. And you guys hug and get real tight. And then we do this. It's your house. Now what is this? Is that a home? Is that a family? No. No, of course not. That's just the raw material. The people, the walls, the furniture. Okay, so that's the basics. But that's not a home. That's not a family. What binds it all together is this. This is your love, guys. Here it comes. The patience, your consideration, your better selves. Man, you just have no idea how good you can be. But you have to use all of it. All of it. It's not like simple masonry, where you use a littler layer of mortar between each row of bricks. No. With this, you have to use tons of it. For every brick, there's half-ton of mortar. It's the glue. It's all those good things you have in you. The love, the wisdom, the generosity. The selflessness. The patience. Patience. At 3am, when everyone's awake because Ibrahim is sick and he can't find the bathroom and he just puked in Katya's bed. Patience when you blink. When you blink and it's 5.30 and it is time to get up again, and you know you're going to be tired all day, all week, all your life. And you're thinking, 'What happened to Greece?' 'What happened to swimming naked off the coast of Greece?' And you have to be willing to make the family out of whatever you have."
"You have to be so much better than you ever thought."