Jodi Picoult Quotes

“You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.”

“I think you can love a person too much.

You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.”

“When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.”

“I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?”

“You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”

“Saying goodbye to the people you love isn't easy”

“It's crazy, right? To love someone who's hurt you? It's even crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you.”

“When someone leaves you once, you expect it to happen again. Eventually you stop getting close enough to people to let them become important to you, because then you don't notice when they drop out of your world.”

“The bottom line in both cases is that people don't change; that no matter how charming you are and how fiercely you love, you cannot turn a person into something she's not.”

“It's never the differences between people that surprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.”

“People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.”

“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.”

“For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.”

“But there's an enormous difference between an audience that's watching you because they can't wait to see what comes next and an audience that's watching you because they're waiting for you to fail.”

“I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.”

“I, um, I have this problem. I broke up with my boyfriend, you see. And I'm pretty upset about it, so I wanted to talk to my best friend. […] The thing is, they're both you.”

“There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light.”

“It took me a lifetime to realizethings don't get lost if they don't have value- you don't miss what you don't care about.”

“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.”

“Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, … It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.”

“The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.”

“I adore the way he looks at me sometimes, as if love is a quantity he cannot measure scientifically, because it multiplies too quickly.”

“I don't know. But Iknow that I'm at the stage of my life where I want, not.

I know that the first person I kissed won't be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.

And I also know better than to dream about things that can't happen.”

“Beliefs are the roads we take to our dreams. Believe you can do something-or believe you can't-and you'll be right everytime.”

“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.”

“Maybe if God gives you a handicap, he makes sure you've got a few extra doses of humor to take the edge off.”

“But there is a different between mending someone who's broken and finding someone who makes you complete.”

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

“Time is an optical illusion- never quite as soild or strong as we think it is”

“The only difference between a wish and a prayer is that you're at the mercy of the universe for the first, and you've got some help with the second.”

“The only monsters I have ever known were men.”

“The hardest thing in the world is believing someone can change. It's always easier to go along with the way things are than to admit that you might have been wrong in the first place.”

“You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.”

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN”

“Accidents did not just happen. From time to time they were carefully plotted, calculated, and arranged to one’s advantage-all, of course, under the cloak of happenstance.”

“A man should live his life a certain way not because of some divine authority, but because of a personal moral obligation to himself and others.”

“Betrayal was a stone beneath a mattress of thr bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?”

“You know how I get angry sometimes? That's because it's the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I'm really here.”

“If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.”

“I grew up in a household where we didn't really talk about our feelings, and where the only reason you went to a doctor was because you'd accidentally cut off a limb with a chain saw.”

“I would rather be in minority and be right, than in the majority and wrong.”

“Believe me, Being gay is not a choice. Noone would choose to make life harder than it has to be.”

“But once you throw a stone, there are ripples in the pond, even if you remove the rock.”

“How could I not have seen this coming, when I looked into your eyes and vowed to be with you forever?”

“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”

“Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.”

“If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?”

“You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?”

“Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.”

“and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.”

“The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.”

“My mother… she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.”

“It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you.”

“Love is not a because, it's a no matter what.”

“Sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.”

“Did you ever walk through a room that's packed with people, and feel so lonely you can hardly take the next step?”

“A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations. There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.”

“The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies”

“You make yourself strong because it's expected of you. You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be.”

“Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed”