Jodi Picoult: Doing (page 3)

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

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

“I realized it was like looking into the sun—you shouldn't do it, because you'd turn your face away and be blind to everything else.”

“What's worse…?
The devil you don't know… or the devil you do?”

“Maybe that’s what we do to the people we love: we take shots in the dark and realize too late we’ve wounded the people we are trying to protect.”

“I never said I do not remember, my grandmother corrects. I said I prefer to forget.”

“Being a teenager isn't all that different from being part of someone else's story. There's always someone who thinks they know better than you do”

“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.”

“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”

“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?”

“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.”

“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?”

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

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

“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?”

“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?”

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