extremely loud & incredibly close, pg. 79.

"The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life...I learned so much. She sang in her youth. She had been to America as a girl. I never knew that. She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary. I learned that she never learned to swim, and for that reason she always loved rivers and lakes. She asked her father, my great-grandfather, your great-great-grandfather, to buy her a dove. She even convinced herself that it contained flight, but did not fly, because it did not want to show anyone what it really was.
That was how much she loved her father.
The letter was destroyed, but its final paragraph is still inside me.
She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with the chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently. When I was your age, your grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say.
If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.
With love,
Your grandmother."