Jodi Picoult Quotes

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

Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

Sometimes knowing what's right isn't a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all.

It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t.

I used to think I'd be just like them when I grew up, but I am not. And the thing is, somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be like them, anyway.

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

That's the crazy thing about lies. You start to fall for them, yourself.

You can miss a person you've never known.

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?

If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.

[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.

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

We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?

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

But that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?

It was the first time she'd discovered something she really didn't want to find, and she didn't know what to do once she'd found it.

Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.

I would tell them that when you look at a person, you never know what the're hiding.

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.

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

What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related.

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

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.

You figured that the only way I'd be happy is if I did the things you thought would be best for me.

But if you seek forgiveness, doesn't that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn't that desperation make you human again?

As Lacy waited for her turn to speak on Peter's behalf, she thought back to the first time she realized she could hate her own child.

You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn't get past something like that, you got through it.

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.

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

He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.

The cost of growth is always a small act of violence.

It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.

My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn’t all about me?

It's the child who's supposed to cry, and the mom who makes it all better, not the other way around, which is why mothers will move heaven and earth to hold it together in front of their own kids.

I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet.

I would prove to you that being different isn't a death sentence but a call to arms.

But sometimes, in order to win, you have to make sacrifices.

if there isn’t a them, there can’t be an us.

I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.

Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles--they kept reality from paralyzing you

Here's my question: What age are you when you're in Heaven?

If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over- only living with the mistakes you've made.

When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.

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