Jodi Picoult Quotes

page 10

“I'd like to say that this time I'd kill myself too.. but I've never had that kind of courage.”

“We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?”

“I’m the princess in an ivory tower, except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself.”

“I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has its own zip code… You don't love someone because they're perfect… You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”

“It's easy to say you will do what's right and shun what's wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that thereno black or white. There are gradations of gray.”

“It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.”

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

“When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.”

“Once you call something a story, it's set in stone. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that can't be transformed, because by definition, if you do that, it's not the same story anymore”

“you can love a person and still hate the decisions they've made, can't you?”

“I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend.”

“We Pisces, we're a special breed.”

“Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.”

“I believe in Hell… but it's here on earth." He shakes his head. "Good people and bad people. As if it were this easy. Everyone is both of these at once.”

“When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

“How do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she's stopped believing the impossible can happen?”

“When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.”

“Sometimes I think there’s no such thing as falling in love. It’s just the fear of losing someone.”

“We have been naive enough to believe that we were invincible; that we could run blind through the hairpin turns of life at treacherous speeds and never crash.”

“Mistakes are something that happen by accident. You didn't walk out the door one morning and fall into some guy's bed. You thought about it, for a while. You made that choice.”

“I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you've got, instead of what you don't.”

“Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.”

“Did you ever think that maybe what you see isn't really what's true?”

“Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.”

“She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess.”

“… when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.”

“But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? Whats stronger- the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?”

“She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.”

“I can't do this to you,' he said, drawing back. Emily put her hand on his and pulled the gun to her temple. 'Then do it for me,' she said.”

“If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.”

“She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life.”

“It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.”

“Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.”

“God doesn't give people burdens they can't handle.”

“I only just found you, I can't lose you now”

“There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found.”

“parenting isn't a noun but a verb--an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.”

“Life was all about being in a certain place, at a certain time.”

“Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.”

“This is what it always comes down to, I realized. There are the ones who believe, and the ones who don't, and caught in the space between them are guns.”

“Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.”

“Do you know how, when you are on the verge of a breakdown, the world pounds in your ears; a rush of blood, of consequence? Do you now how it feels when the truth cuts your tongue to ribbons, and still you have to speak it?”

“When this is over… we will got to the rainforest, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.”

“A world that was crowded with people could still be a very lonely place.”

“Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.”

“When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.”

“Just so you know, when they say "once upon a time"…. they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.”

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

“[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.”