“Basically, the world is a giant shithole. But some of us are capable of imagining something better.”

“No one's family is normal. Normalcy is a lie invented by advertising agencies to make the rest of us feel inferior.”

“[Ava] had always thought the main relationship in the family was the one between Nancy and her daughters. To have a family, you needed a father, of course, and Jimmy had played that role perfectly well, if you were okay with an old-fashioned interpretation of the job. But the Nickerson family was all about the women and their noisy, bickering, gossiping, interfering relationships with one another.And now it seemed that maybe she ahd been looking at it all wrong. Maybe she and Lauren were just the icing, and the basic, underlying cake of the family was the couple in front of her who had a shared history she knew very little about.”

“And Derek was... what?A pair of dark eyes that hid more than they revealed and some broad shoulders and a mouth that could be cold and thin and then suddenly widen into a generous grin just when you thought such a thing was impossible.”

“He was wearing a plain white oxford unbuttoned over a T-shirt, but something about the way they fit made him look put together, like an Abercrombie model (well, like an Abercrombie model who had remembered to put on a shirt that morning).”

“He can’t ground her if he’s already killed her,” I pointed out when Juliana quoted this to me. “Well, he can, but it wouldn’t have the same impact.”

“Man, I hated not being able to figure someone out.And from the slightly uncertain look he gave me as we all went to class, I suspected he felt the same way.”