“Children do deserve perfect love, but it isn’t because they’re perfect, which means it has to be some other word besides ‘deserve’; but I don’t know what the word is. But then it’s true for adults too; after all, we’re just the warped remains of imperfectly loved children. None of us gets the perfect love we ought, but maybe that’s what life is for, to give us time to collect it in bits and pieces, a little here, a little there. Maybe we’re supposed to put it together ourselves slowly.”
