Four Christmases Quotes

Mr. Larkin, I would burn the world down for your daughter. Then Crew would pick her up and carry her across the ashes, and Michael would rebuild it to be everything she ever wanted.

Even time is not immune to time. Once the only times that mattered were the rhythms of the planet and the body. The first people on this island needed time four times a year: the solstices and the equinoxes, to avoid planting seed too early or too late. When the Church got here, it staked out Sundays, Christmases, Easter, and began colonizing the year with saints' days. The English brought short leases and tax deadlines. With the railway, the hours had to march in time. Now TV satellites beam the same six o'clock news everywhere at the same six o'clock. Science has been as busy splicing time into ever thinner slivers as it has matter... But nobody knows if time is slowing down or speeding up

It was splendid to have four seasons. The first summer produced so many hours of both beaming sun and bellowing rain that it seemed to add up to more than twenty-four hours in a day. Everything was green as a fairytale. Autumn was sharp and red, the sloping fields half-hidden in the morning by white fog. In the evenings, unseen bonfires scented the air as crickets shrilled their goodbyes to the heat. In the winter, it snowed with such thorough confidence that it seemed white Christmases must be the norm (they weren’t). And just when Mór and Niall had grown bored of hiding from the cold in the farmhouse, spring ferns uncurled in the forest, crocuses peeped out from under the newly repaired porch, and a new year’s sky washed clear and fresh-faced above.

When he’d married her years ago she’d known being with the Teams took most of his focus. Missions had taken him away for months at a time. He’d been deployed to Iraq four times and Afghanistan twice, each time for six months or more. Then there were too many individual ops to even count. Though the deployments were hard Cat took care of everything like she’d been doing it all along. And she had, actually. She was literally a single parent. He hadn’t been at Dillon’s birth or Tate’s. Christmases had passed with barely a glance. If she hadn’t have sent him a box of treats every holiday he wouldn’t even have noticed them. But even when he’d been physically home, mentally he hadn’t. In his mind he’d always been preparing for the next op. He was on the range with his rifle every day, rain or shine. Training in the gym every day. Keeping that fine combat ready edge took a lot of grueling work. The only thing he’d been able to do well for his family was leave. And provide for them monetarily. “You

that I don’t feel eighty-four. I don’t feel it at all. I feel your age. Inside. You never get any older. You can’t believe it’s all gone, and all those years have gone past. You think it can’t possibly be me. Getting old happens to other people, but it won’t happen to me. But it does. Suddenly you turn around and all the summers and Christmases have smooshed all the gither,

She understood Paul from the inside out, two kids, nine or ten parents’ evenings, eleven or twelve Christmases, eight or nine holidays in France, five seasons of The Wire, however many hundred fucks and takeaways. (Could it be thousands? Four figures if you added the fucks and the takeaways together, probably, although there was no earthly reason why you would.)

One year, we ordered four thousand pink iPods from Apple for Christmas. In mid-November, an Apple rep contacted us to say, “Problem—we can’t make Christmas delivery. They’re transitioning from a disk drive to a hard-drive memory in the iPods, and they don’t want to make any more using the old technology. Once we get the new ones made, we’ll get you your four thousand. But it won’t be in time for the holiday.” Other retailers would have simply apologized to their customers for the failure to deliver a product on time. That wasn’t going to fly at Amazon.com. We were not the kind of company that ruined people’s Christmases because of a lack of availability—not under any circumstances. So we went out and bought four thousand pink iPods at retail and had them all shipped to our Union Street office. Then we hand-sorted them, repacked them, and shipped them to the warehouse to be packaged and sent to our customers. It killed our margins on those iPods, but it enabled us to keep our promise to our customers. During the next weekly business review, we had to explain to Jeff what we were doing and why. He just nodded approvingly and said, “I hope you’ll get in touch with Apple and try to get our money back from the bastards.” Ultimately, Apple did grudgingly split the cost difference with us. But even if they hadn’t, it still would have been the right thing for Amazon to do.