Arthur had spent his whole adult life in a world that measured everything, that assigned a value to every hour and a return to every effort, and it had made him rich and it had made him lonely and it had very nearly made him nothing else at all.

And here was a small person who could not be measured by any of his instruments, whose worth had nothing to do with productivity or return, whose entire value was simply that she was, and that she was ours, and that she laughed when he handed her a stuffed dog.

She was teaching him, slowly, weekend by weekend, on his knees on a play mat, the one lesson his entire education had left out: that the things that matter most are precisely the things that cannot be counted.

I do not think he could have learned it from a book, or a sermon, or even from me.