When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep her close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: Until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.
Jodi PicoultI close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.
Jodi PicoultAt 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.
Jodi PicoultโPick ten strangers and stick them in a room, and ask them which of us they feel sorrier for - you or me - and we all know who they'll choose.
Jodi PicoultWhy is it that only in the very beginnings of a relationship are you aware of the heat coming from inside a person, of the number of inches you would have to move for your shoulders to brush as if it were an accident?
Jodi Picoult