You are the person a child was made by — the daily, patient, unwitnessed construction of a human being out of ten thousand small acts of staying.

Blood makes a relative.

Only showing up, over and over, for twenty-two years, makes a father.

My daughters figured that out somewhere in a college dorm room with an old cigar box open between them, and then they walked onto a stage and taught it to eight hundred strangers, and to me.

Chapter 18 — Today We Chose You

Then all three of them raised their right hands, and together, at the tops of their voices, they said it into the microphone so the whole world could hear: