Jodi Picoult Quotes

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“You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.”

“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.”

“True love can break the most powerful curse”

“I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.”

“Pride is an evil dragon; it sleeps underneath your heart and then roars when you need silence.”

“My grandmother told me that her father used to ask her a riddle: What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together?

Bread, of course.”

“It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there's a whole story in who's left behind.”

“so i do what i do best. i move in the opposite direction.”

“Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.”

“A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it… You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.”

“Why do some memories bleed out of nowhere and others stay locked behind doors?”

“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.”

“The apple… came before Adam and Eve in the story of creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that's how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit.”

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

“Can you imagine what it would be like to know that your life was just going to be a series of days that were
all the same, that were do-overs?”

“You can't be real," Delilah murmurs.
"Says who?" I ask. "Did you really think that a story exists only when you're reading it?”

“Love is not an equation… It is not a contract, and it's not a happy ending. It is the slate under the chalk and the ground buildings rise from and the oxygen in the air.”

“I imagine how cool it would be if all small talk wasn't lies.”

“i'm sure i'm worth a lot more dead than alive”

“There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.”

“Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's.”

“Love has nothing to do with what you're looking at and everything to do with who's looking.”

“You're unwilling to go out on a limb because it just might break underneath you.”

“Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together.”

“No matter how much you consumed, you would not have your fill.”

“Jacoblike a totally normal young man. He's clearly intelligent. But having his day disrupted probably makes him feel the same way I would if I was suddenly told to bungee off the top of the Sears Tower.”

“Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital… Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain.”

“What could it be like to find out, in a matter of minutes, that the person you believed the sun rose and set on was not the person you'd thought?”

“She understood what it was like to stand right in front of people you loved, even though they could not see you.”

“A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead.”

“All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.”

“Engaging with haters is like rearranging pictures on the Titanic. What’s the point?”

“How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.”

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

“Dark matter has a gravitation effect on other objects. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.”

“Imagine a world that seemed so much bigger than you. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn't even know existed.”

“You can have the best intentions, but the moment there’s a hairline crack, it is only a matter of time before you go to pieces.”

“And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it's gone, so are you.”

“Or in other words, it's the substance you've got when you start that determines the outcome.”

“People in the real world would kill for a happily ever after, and you're willing to just throw it away?"
I look away from her. "It's hardly a happily ever after when you wind up right at the beginning.”

“It was nice not having to be the one in control, for a little while. It was nice to be the one who was protected, instead of the one who'd been protecting eveyone else.”

“eskimos maybe? believed stars were holes in the sky where people who died could peek through at you”

“She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.”

“What being home-schooled has taught me, more than anything, is what a waste of a life high school is.”

“She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime.”

“Violence up close has a smell. Like copper blood and charcoal burning.”

“Envy comes from wanting something that isn't yours, but grief comes from losing something you've already had.”

“People don’t just disappear. There’s always a reason, or an enemy with a grudge. There’s always a loose thread that starts to unravel.”

“But what if your obsession has nothing to do with drugs or thrills or money? What if what you want most in the world is to recapture the way life was a week, a month, a year ago-and you are willing to do whatever it takes?”