Jodi Picoult Quotes - Page 2

If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.

I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don't understand how I'm going to get from here to there.

Prayer is like water - something you can't imagine has the strength or power to do any good, and yet give it time and it can change the lay of the land.

The ability to find sparks may be buried so deep in you that you stop believing there's a God. Until someone comes along, with so much light in her that you can't help but see your own, and when you're together,that light grows even brighter.

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.

Listen, I would say, this is not how I thought our lives would go; and maybe we cannot find our way out of this alley. But there is no one I'd rather be lost with.

There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.

Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.

But kids don't stay where they're supposed to. You turn around and find her not in the bedroom but hiding in a closet; you turn around and see she's not three but thirteen. Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.

Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.

Babies don't come with instruction booklets. You'd learn the same way we all do -- you'd read up on dinosaurs, you'd Google backhoes and skidders. And you don't need a penis to go buy a baseball glove.

...courage wasn’t something you were bequeathed at birth, and it wasn’t a lack of fright. It was overcoming your fear, because the ones you love mattered more.

You'd be surprised." Charlie said."You go to bed one night singing her a lullaby, and she wakes up listening to Limp Bizkit.""What the hell is Limp Bizkit?

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aidbeing ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbellyof a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times Istayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that Iwould not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that myfather worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to comehome to a house that felt too big for us.

That's the crazy thing about lies. You start to fall for them, yourself.

Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he'd promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again.

I was in the mood to make out in the back row of the movie theater with someone who did not know my first name. I wanted three guys to fight for the honor of buying me a drink

Isn’t that what true romance issupposed 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 only thing they'll let you shoot with a camera.

I just completed The Tenth Circle. It is an excellent mystery story surrounding a family with modern day issues.

She has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James. He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself? James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her.

Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday.

A robber? In the trash bins? Honestly, Wes. This is Salem Falls, not the set of Law and Order.

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place--because we become better people in it.

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.

Nowadays, I dont have expectations, and this way she beats them all.

It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else's. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party - a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.

...when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see.

Edward: You know what the difference is between a dream and a goal? he used to say to me. A plan.

Better safe than sorry!

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers, interrupt dinner.

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?

Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation., and to others, like a pearl.

That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes.I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

I think there are two different oceans - the one that plays with you in the summer, and the one that gets so mad in the winter.

You know, Sage, Jesus didn't tell us to forgive everyone. He said turn the other cheek, but only if you the one who was hit. Even the Lord's Prayer says it loud and clear: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Not others. What Jesus challenges us to do is to let go of the wrong done to you personally, not the wrong done to someone else. But most Christians incorrectly assume that this means that being a good christian means forgiving all sins, and the sinners.

Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles--they kept reality from paralyzing you

You know how sometimes, your life is so perfect you’re afraid for the next moment, because it couldn’t possibly be quite as good? That’s what it felt like.

But without a reader, a story is only half complete. It's like blueprints that never get built; like a swimming pool without water. The foundation's there, but it's useless. Without a reader, the words just sit on the page, waiting to come alive in someone's imagination.

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn't a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you'd been missing.

He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.