Quotes from Lauren Fox

Even in your closest friendships, you're alone. Maybe it's your best friend who, in fact, reminds you, just by making it her business to try to know your heart, that no one can - that our fate is to suffer in isolation and then die. But it's our collective fate! So I guess I'm an optimist.

A mother teaches her daughter to perpetuate the tedious rituals of her own imperfect life. And by instilling in her child the virtues of order, she shows her how to keep the chaos at bay.

If you think too much about a thing, it is no longer innocent even if, in truth, it began that way

Years later, admiring his dark-haired daughter, the light of his life, in the city he wouldn't have been able to find on a map back when he lived in Germany, he understood that even pain could bring joy. It wasn't a trade-off, and it didn't give him comfort; it was just something true.

The thought of having to accumulate a new history with someone makes me feel uneven, as if my legs are two different lengths.

Mrs. Beverly Jean Reinhoffer is our cat, of whom Chris has full custody. I never liked her and was glad to see her go.

Hannah has gone over to her friend Delaney's house. Hannah has a slew of friends with names like that, Delaney and Cassidy and Reilly, and even a tiny, owlish girl named O'Malley: names, it seems, that their parents plucked arbitrarily from the Boston phone book.

Guess what a group of chickens is called?" he asked. "I do not know." "Go on," he said. "Guess." "A bucket?

Okay, I'll admit that Chris and I still want each other. But need? Need is for your first lover on your twin bed in your college dorm.

After a certain amount of time with someone, crisis is an aphrodisiac.

Isabel is a very talented photographer," she says. "Indeed, I am! I like to take photographs of babies nestling in oversized teacups." I spear a pea with my fork and hold it up. "Or sometimes I dress them in little green pea costumes and arrange them as if they're peering out of gigantic pods.

You don't have to call it 'the apartment,' " I say, suddenly uncomfortably aware that I am standing next to our bed half naked and about to be abandoned by my sort-of-ex-husband whom I probably should not have just slept with. "Just say, 'my apartment. I have to get back to my apartment.'

I'm trying," he calls after me, and I want to say, Yes, you are. He'll get up in a few minutes, put his clothes on, and get in his car and head to his apartment a mile from here, the two-bedroom on the East Side that I helped him pick out, near the lake and full of light, newly decorated with inexpensive but decent furniture and blue rugs and lots of pillows, and far too cozy to be as temporary as we agreed it was.

And then the crack seals up and I'm back on familiar ground, and I remember to miss my friend, and I am relieved.