My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

Elsa decides that even if people she likes have been shits on earlier occasions, she has to learn to carry on liking them. You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits. She thinks that this will have to be the moral of this story.

Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”

It’s difficult to say for sure whether Granny is a bit odd because she’s spent too much time in Miamas, or Miamas is a bit odd because Granny’s spent too much time there.

“Stop fussing. You sound like your mother. Do you have a lighter?”
“I’m seven!”
“How long are you going to use that as an excuse?”
“Until I’m not seven anymore?”

the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the not-a-shit side as one can.

Because you need to care about something, Elsa. As soon as anyone cared about anything in this world, your granny always dismissed it as ‘nagging,’ but if you don’t care about anything you’re actually not alive at all. You’re only existing. . . .

You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits. She thinks that this will have to be the moral of this story. Christmas stories are supposed to have morals.

And being special is the best way of being different.

“People drink wine to forget things that are hard, right?”

“Or to have the strength to remember. I think.”

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people left behind want to stop living,