Jodi Picoult Quotes

If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related.

I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.

Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up

It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t.

No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.

When you love someone you let them take care of you.

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right." (pg. 481)

Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy's dying wish?

You will ask me, after this, why, I didn't tell you this before. It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable to write yourself free.

Here's what I hadn't realized: the mother you haven't seen for almost thirty-six years isn't your mother, she's a stranger. Sharing DNA doesn't make you fast friends. This wasn't a joyous reunion. It was just awkward.

It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that, or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.

She is not the child that mirrors me, and yet when you put us side by side, there are definite similarities. It's not in the shape of the mouth but the set of it, the sheer determination that silvers our eyes.

The Native Americans know that wolves are mirrors for humans. What they show us are our strengths and weaknesses... When I lived with the wolves, I was proud of the reflection of myself. But when I came back, I always paled in comparison.

Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.

When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn't.

My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn’t all about me?

Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't see clearly?

You may think there's nothing very interesting about seeing someone sleep, but that probably means you've never found the girl of your dreams.

It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.

How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future.

When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires

Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.

But if you seek forgiveness, doesn't that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn't that desperation make you human again?

You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

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.

The feeling that she was going to explode, that she was too big for her own skin.

And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.

The only monsters I have ever known were men.

Was that all it took to be brave? Knowing that someone believed in you?

Logically, I understand that it wasn't Edward's fault my family fell apart after he left. But when you're eleven years old, you don't give a flip about logic. You just really miss holding your big brother's hand.

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.

Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do.

Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting.

Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.

‎Pick ten strangers and stick them in a room, and ask them which of us they feel sorrier for - you or me - and we all know who they'll choose.

I learned a long time ago with you that folks who were trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you've done your job - no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.

When you have been burned by fire once, you don't leap into the flames again.

Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.

What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.

If you think about someone you've loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details.

When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you don't just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can't be destroyed, just channeled into something else.

My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn't a social construct but an instinct.

You figured that the only way I'd be happy is if I did the things you thought would be best for me.

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

be a good listener, don't judge and don't put boundaries on someone else's grief.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

My mother used to say that sometimes if you turn a tragedy over in your hand, you can see a miracle running through it, like fool's gold in the hardest shard of rock.

I would tell them that when you look at a person, you never know what the're hiding.

Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you’d let them go. But now I look at you, and I dreamed about Maggie, and I see that I’ve been wrong. If you really love someone, Allie, I think you have to take them back.

What would you do if you only had one day left in this world? Spend it with the people you love? Travel to the far corners of the earth to see as many wonders as possible? Eat nothing but chocolate? Would you apologize for all your mistakes? Would you stand up to those you'd never had the courage to face? Would you tell your secret crush that you loved him or her? Why is it that we wait till the last minute to do the things we should be doing all along?

This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.

Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person.

But Katie knew it was a sin, had known from the moment she made the decision to lie with Adam. However, the transgression wasn't making love without the sanction of marriage. It was that for the first time in her life, Katie had put herself first. Put her own wants and needs above everything and everyone else.

What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind - a trail made of stripped off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia - and who hands back each of these when its needed?