Jodi Picoult: Want (page 3)

“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.”

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

“Parents aren’t the people you come from. They’re the people you want to be, when you grow up.”

“I don't want to make the same mistake twice. I don't want to tell myself it's over when it's not.”

“There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.”

“Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river.”

“I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.”

“If you want to see God laugh, make a plan.”

“There was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher.”

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

“[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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“Well, you have to find that rare someone for whom you’re not putting on a show. Someone who shines a spotlight in your direction—not because you’re who they need you to be, or who they want you to be…just because you’re you.”

“We could all be lucky. We could all be what we want to be, instead of who someone else told us to be.”