“Apparently, it used to be extremely common for families to have two parents. They stayed together because that’s what all the other parents did. Now there are so many options, so many different ways to be a family. So many ways to rip a family apart.”

“Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.”

“Apparently, he’d killed so many family members that he must have significantly affected the Lore’s population. Doing my part for the environment.”

“In normal families, unbroken families, the mother and the father are like two hands cupped together, and held by those hands are the children. In my family, the hands have pulled apart and the children have been dropped. If one parent isn’t looking after you, they just assume the other one is. You find out you don’t really belong anywhere.”

“Nearly all of the Nobodies he saw were men. Women, he thought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world--children, families, friends.”

“There are many reasons why so many of us choose to share our lives with a pet--it's the perfect antidote for loneliness, providing an endless supply of smiles and the certainty of unwavering companionship, and many of us have seen the way a pet can make a family feel whole.”