Jodi Picoult Quotes

I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room - but eventually, you learn to live with it.

Then Henry speaks again. "Did he do it?" I turn to him slowly. "Does it matter?

Words, he knew, could scar.

I wont let you fall, he said, and because he never did, the world from that vantage point stops being so crazy.

It turned out people truly did cry into their coffee cups.

What made you happy once might not make you happy now.

Funny how a woman can be bold as an army when there's a need fer it, and yet so gentle.

Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed
sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

Isn't that what true romance is supposed to be about? Finding the person who's your soul mate. Someone you dream about at night.Someone whose name is on your lips when you wake up in the morning.

... the miracle about steel is that you can hammer it so thin it's stretched to its limit, but that doesn't mean it will break.

People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don't, how will they ever come to appreciate safety?

Tutoring a four year old to get into an exclusive preschool made as much sense as hiring a swim coach for a guppy.

Sometimes the key to happiness is just expecting a little bit less

Being part of his entourage was like the sun coming through a plate-glass window: golden, something to lift your face toward.

Just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way.

I sometimes wonder if it's just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they're supposed to be by going nowhere.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

Sometimes all you need to live one more day is a good reason to stick around.

I imagined what it would be like to hold a butterfly in your hands something bejeweled and treasured and to know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees.

She thought of death like the seam of a hem: each time you lose someone close, it unraveled a little. You could still go along with your life, but you'd be forever tripping over something you previously took for granted.

You build a wall to keep something unwanted out ... or to hold something precious in.

Only cheats go back on a promise.

Scars are just a treasure map for pain you've buried too deep to remember.

But mostly I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet. I still loved him. It felt like anything else permanent that has gone missing; a lost tooth, a severed leg. You might know better, but that doesn't keep your tongue from poling at the hole in your gum, or your phantom limb from aching.

Campbell" Julia says "Don't do this to me"
"Do what?"
"Push me off the same cliff twice

There are all sorts of experiences we can't really put a name to ... The birth of a child, for one. Or the death of a parent. Falling in love. Words are like nets
we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, grief, or wonder. Finding God is like that, too. If it's happened to you, you know what it feels like. But try to describe it to someone else
and language only takes you so far.

Whenever people start talking about curing too many things with science, I'm always glad bioethics wasn't

Is his work vengeance? Or Justice? There is the finest line between the two and when i try to focus on it, it becomes less and less clear.

The brain of a person in love will show activity in the amygdala, which is associated with gut feelings, and in the nucleus accumbens, an area associated with rewarding stimuli that tends to be active in drug abusers. Or, to recap: the brain of a person in love doesn't look like the brain of someone overcome by deep emotion. It looks like the brain of a person who's been snorting coke.

it's crazy, isn't it, the way we always say that children belong to their parents, when it's really the other way around?

Regret hung from the hem of everyone's lives, a rip cord reminder that what you want is not always what you get. Look at himself, outliving Aimee. Or Az, trying to find his daughter, only to have her wind up dead. Look at Shelby, with a child who was dying by degrees. Ethan, born into a body nobody deserves. At some point or another, everyone was failed by this world. Disappointment was the one thin humans had in common.
Taken this way, Ross didn't feel quite so alone. Trapped in your whirlpool of what might have been, you might no be able to drag yourself out - but you could be saved by someone else who reached in.

Morally, no one has the right to judge anyone else. But legally, it's not a right - it's a responsibility.

It was a hairline crack, one might never have noticed, except for the fact it grew wider and wider, until there was a canyon between them. A child's job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed?

There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you.

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

He looked the way I felt around Delia: as if a second sun was growing underneath my breastbone, a secret I could barely conceal.

There are some things, I think, you're btter off not remembering.

You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

I would figure out, later, how to explain to my boss that, for me, Delia will never be a story, but a happy ending.

There are certain earthbound spirits that have no way to expend their energy or anger. They are often associated with teenage girls, who are formed of pure drama, or with those who've died in vain. They have been known to manipulate the elements of the earth - water, fire, wind, dust - to make their presence known.

Saying goodbye to the people you love isn't easy

When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim.

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic ... only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

The crisis might be what sticks in my mind, but the in-between moments are the ones I would not have missed for the world.

Marriage didnt really seem to be about love; it was about the ability to live together for a long period of time

Let me tell you what you feel like when you know you are ready to die.
You sleep a lot, and when you wake up the very first thought in your head is that you wish you could go back to bed.
You go entire days without eating, because food is a commodity that keeps you here.
You read the same page a hundred times.
You rewind your life like a videocassette and see the things that make you weep, things that make you pause, but nothing that makes you want to play it forward.
You forget to comb your hair, to shower, to dress.
And then one day, when you make the decision that you have enough energy left in you to do this one, last, monumental thing, there comes a peace. Suddenly you are counting moments as you haven't for months. Suddenly you have a secret that makes you smile, that makes people say you look wonderful, although you feel like a shell-brittle and capable of cracking into a thousand pieces.

I tell them that there is nothing more selfish than trying to change someone's mind because they don't think like you. Just because something is different does not mean it should not be respected. I

Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.

Silence has a sound

I'm burning, after all, even if it's not for my convictions. Does flesh charring off at the bone hurt less when you know you are right, even though everyone thinks you are wrong?
That line of reasoning leads me right to Andrew.
And then it's a fast beeline to thinking of Delia.
I don't think anyone has ever died of unrequited love. I wonder if I'll be the first.

This time of night, the sky was flung wide open, stars spread like a story across the horizon.

You would wind up as a cat, I told her. They don't need anyone else.
I need you, she replied.
Well, I said. Maybe I'll come back as catnip.

Hope is what makes you look outside the window to see if it's stopped raining. Hope is what makes you believe he'll text you back. Hope is why you buy your jeans a little tight ... Hope is why you get out of bed in the morning, and why you dream at night. Hope is what makes us believe that things can only get better. Hope is what keeps us going.

I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.

What became of all those lost balloons: they were the loves that slipped out of our fists; the blank eyes that rose in every night sky.

That's what love is, when your hindsight is 20/20, and you still wouldn't change a thing.

As it turns out, you can function while your heart is being torn to shreds.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

you never forget your first fall.

Since when does anyone get the option to do the easiest?

I'm weird.
Everyone says so.

She was the only one for whom the house didn't have to be cleaned, for whom she didn't have to wear her makeup, and around whom she could say anything without fear of repercussions, or of looking truly stupid.

When she wanted to escape her life, she read books

Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole.

Look at that," Michael said. "My daughter's an hour old and she's already sleeping with some guy.

I'm telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they'd conclude that most people had children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn't one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren't very flattering.

You couldn't have strength without weakness, you couldn't have light without dark, you couldn't have love without loss

I believe everyone has spirit guides - but not everyone bothers to start a conversation with them. Spirit guides have lived as humans. They have a soul level that's very evolved and have learned a lot of life lessons. (That's the goal, you know - keep graduating to the next level, until you have a soul that is as pure as it can be.)

Emotion, and that negative moments are like scribbling with permanent marker

I was starting to see that the past might color the future, but it didn't determine it. And if I could believe that, it was much easier to let go of what I'd done wrong.

Every holocaust starts with an ember. You just have to know what to look for.

and my mother raised me by herself, supporting us by hosting home parties to sell sex toys instead of Tupperware.

They look up at me and see a rich lady in maternity clothes. They don't realize I am one of them.

You know ... how it feels to sit at a bar and not be judged- to just have a drink and let it all hang out. Why can't the church be more like that? Why can't you walk in and say, "Oh, God, it's just you. Cool. I can be myself now." Not in a way that ignores our sins- but in a way that makes us accountable for them.

Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up.

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?
Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

A trial, it often came down to who had the best story.

On the other side of the curtain, two separate wars were being fought. One was to save the life of a women who'd been beaten to near death by her husband. The other was to allow her child to have any kind of a life at all.

Frankly, people don't make sense to me.

If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.

The new father finally hangs up the phone, laughing at absolutely nothing. "Congratulations," I say, when what I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in stars so that she never, ever does to him what I have done to my parents.

But if you are going to say you are unnerved by how Turk Bauer is filled with hate, you must admit that Ruth, too, is filled with hate. You heard it,

A woman is at the funeral of her mother. There, she meets a man she doesn't know and has never met, who she thinks is her dream partner. But because of the circumstances, she forgets to ask for his number, and she can't find him afterward. A few days later, she kills her own sister. Why?

These days her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn't anymore.

When you're hurting deeply, you go inward.

God, don't they teach you how to spell these days?"
"No," I answer. "They teach us to use spell-check.

She knew how you went about falling in love; she did not know how you went about falling into trust.

Seems indecisive, doesn't it? Either be a period or be a comma, but make up your mind.

You could only save someone that wanted to be saved; otherwise, you'd be be dragged down for the count, too.

Invisibility, actually, was something he was pretty good at. He'd perfected it over the past twelve years.

I believe in love. I think it just hits you and pulls the rug out from underneath you and, like a baby, demands your attention every minute of the day.

For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.

In a minute - Sometime soon - Maybe next time - Make it June Until later Doesnt always come

I didn't know why it's called "getting lost". even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turns to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected

She'd take these random occurrences and elevate them to oracles; she'd pretend that they were enough to justify her actions.
Or lack therof.

Must you argue everything?"
"Yeah. I'm a lawyer.

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When you love someone, you'll do anything you can to keep them with you.

She is quiet for a moment. "have you ever been swimming in the summer", she asks, "when a cloud comes in front of the sun? You know how, for a few seconds, you're absolutely freezing in th water and you think you'd better get out and dry off? But then all of a sudden the sun's back out and you're warm again and when you tell people how much fun you had swimming you wouldn't even think to mention those clouds." Cara shrugs. "That's what it's like, with my father." -Cara

Whatever your father did was not this woman's fault. And if she made him happy, when I obviously didn't, then the last thing you should be doing is yelling at her.