Jodi Picoult citations

Page 15

“Regardez mon enfant, voyez l'éclat de ses boucles folles et son sourire pareil à un vol de papillon. Un tel visage ne peut pas être celui de quelqu'un qui meurt à petit feu. Je ne la connais que depuis deux ans. Mais si vous preniez chaque souvenir, chaque instant, si vous les étiriez bout à bout, ça ferait une éternité.”

“Je suis devenu pompier parce que je voulais sauver des gens. Mais j'aurais dû être plus précis. J'aurais dû citer des noms.”

“Vous n'aimez pas quelqu'un parce qu'il est parfait. Vous les aimez malgré le fait qu'ils ne le sont pas.”

“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.”

“She became whoever she needed to be to survive, but she never let anyone else define her.”

“How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?”

“What if instead of focusing on what you don't have, you concentrate on what you've got?”

“A wish is just words. Belief is the catalyst. It's what sets that wish into motion.”

“it was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.”

“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.”

“There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future.”

“It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place--because we become better people in it.”

“Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't see clearly?”

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

“When she smiles, it feels like the first warm day of March-- after an eternity of snow, when you suddenly remember how summer feels on the backs of your bare calves & in the part of your hair.”

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

“What could you give me," I ask, my voice shaking, "to make me forget… that you forgot about me?”

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

“Everytime I look at a zebra, I can't figure out whether it's black with white stripes or white with black stripes, and that frustrates me.”

“Q: How would you like your eggs in the morning?

A: Unfertilized”

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

“It just goes to show you: every baby is born beautiful.
It's what we project on them that makes them ugly.”

“A bruise is how the body remembers it’s been wronged.”

“Leave it to a man to mess things up”

“what made you happy once might not make you happy now.”

“if you think of a relationship as a living entity, I guess it's one thing if the missing two percent is, like, a fingernail. But when it's the heart, that's a whole different ball of wax.”

“We all have things that come back to haunt us. Some of us just see them more clearly than others.”

“There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.”

“In the wild, an elephant mother and daughter stay in close proximity their whole lives; I hope I am that lucky.”

“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.”

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