Jodi Picoult Quotes

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“When the news you don't want to hear is looming before you like Everest, two things can happen. Tragedy can run you through like a sword, or it can become your backbone. Either you fall apart and sob, or you say, 'Right. What's next?”

“I shouldn't have eavesdropped, but sometimes, that's the only way to find out the truth.”

“The Inuit say that the stars are holes in heaven. And every time we see the people we loved shining through, we know they're happy.”

“When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies.”

“Tradionally, parents made decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down.”

“Any highway… they all take you to the same place, don't they?”

“Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.”

“What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn't fit into? And the only way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your corners, sand yourself down, modify yourself to fit? How come we haven't been able to change the puzzle instead?”

“Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets, lies, stories. We all tell them. Sometimes, because we hope to entertain. Sometimes, because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.”

“It just goes to show you: you can put nine insane miles between you and another person. You can make a vow to never speak his name. You can surgically remove someone from your life. And still, he'll haunt you.”

“When it's all over, you're remembered for what you did, not what you said you were going to do.”

“Be kind to others before you take care of yourself; make whoever you're with feel like they matter.”

“A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up.”

“A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself.”

“Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.”

“Sara: "You are so brave," I tell her, and then I smile. "When I grow up, I want to be just like you."
To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. "No Mommy," she says. "You'd be sick.”

“There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you.”

“In reality, you don’t ever change the hurricane. You just learn how to stay out of its path.”

“My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.”

“No matter who you are, there is some part of you that always wishes you were someone else.”

“It takes two people to make a friendship work”

“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.”

“From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest.
Darkness, you know, is relative.”

“Isn't it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?”

“Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.”

“if there isn’t a them, there can’t be an us.”

“There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character… 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.”

“Loneliness is a mirror, and recognizes itself.”

“Risk always looks different when you're beating the system than when you've been beaten.”

“You can’t blame someone if they honestly don’t understand that their reality isn’t the same as yours.”

“I don't know why it's called "getting lost." Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turnd to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected to be.”

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

“It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.”

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

“No matter what Joe Hoffman and Wade Preston say, it's not gender that makes a family; it's love. You don't need a mother and a father; you don't necessarily even need two parents. You just need someone who's got your back.”

“Why are terms of endearment always food? Honey, cookie, sugar, pumpkin. Its not like caring about someone is enough to actually sustain you.”

“You always knew after shitty things happened, who your friends really were.”

“I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. And sometimes it’s not for quite as long as we would have expected or hoped. But it is still far better than never having had those children at all.”

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

“They ask, how could this happen here? Well. How could it not happen here?”

“I know what it's like when the things you believe make you feel like you're on the outside looking in.”

“Your hand fits mine like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle”

“It's the child who's supposed to cry, and the mom who makes it all better, not the other way around, which is why mothers will move heaven and earth to hold it together in front of their own kids.”

“Here's my question: What age are you when you're in Heaven?”

“By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.”

“I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you always know what's hidden underneath.”

“I'm weird.
Everyone says so.”

“People change, but only if you give them room to do it.”

“And he made love to her, offering his body in both tenderness and anger, unsure which was the best way to pass her bits of his soul so that she could patch her own with it”