Jodi Picoult Quotes

It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.

They don't like the thought of someone else making demands on the person whom they see as belonging entirely to them.

A very wise man once told me that you can't look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up

I like the word ‘evil’. Scramble it a little and you will get ‘vile’ and ‘live’. ‘Good’, on the other hand, is just a command to ‘go do’.

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

Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.

I think we deserve a happily-ever-after.""If anyone ever did, it's us.

You’ll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you’re still the one in control.

When they laugh, it sounds like confetti.

You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

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

It's never the differences between people that surprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

It's certainly my honor to be able to, hopefully, change the world a tiny bit, one mind at a time.

I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.

Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.

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

My mother used to say that sometimes if you turn a tragedy over in your hand, you can see a miracle running through it, like fool's gold in the hardest shard of rock.

My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn't a social construct but an instinct.

Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.

The only monsters I have ever known were men.

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

The best place to cry is on a mother's arms.

My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.

You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.

She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.

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

Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.

Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.

When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.

That's the crazy things about lies, you start to believe them yourself." (pg. 342)

The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we're supposed to.

The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.

When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you don't just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can't be destroyed, just channeled into something else.

Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn't even any guilt.

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?

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

At that moment, Oliver realized that home is not a place, but rather, the people who love you.

Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.

Maybe a mother wasn't what she seemed to be on the surface.

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.

You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.

If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.

you're not a bad person because you want to be yourself.

He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable

All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.

I don't know what he means by that, but I nod and smile at him. You'd be surprised at how far that response can get you in a conversation where you are completely confused.