Jodi Picoult: Likeness (page 4)

“If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been-what would you take?”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

“You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.'

How?'

Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.”