But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.

You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.

that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep

There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.

Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. Ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.

Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.