Jodi Picoult Quotes

[There's a] point where you have to leave the dough alone. It's silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.

And in general, the residents of the town wondered why they all felt hollow just beneath the throat, the result of missing something they had never been able to name in the first place.

True love can break the most powerful curse

If you were drifting with a thousand other people, could you really still say you were lost?

When you look into your baby’s eyes,” Lacy said softly, “you see everything you hope they can be…not everything you wish they won’t become.

when you [lose someone], it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all nerves are still a little raw

I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.

It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it’s there.

What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead.

Everyone deserves a happy ending.

I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it - when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands.

The way I challenge myself is by writing something that really engages me, that doesn't have an easy answer, and isn't always an easy book to write.

There are some things, I think, you're btter off not remembering.

Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.

Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans: once you leave the litter, you server contact with your mothers.

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.

Here's a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we'd rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman who's soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to.

Close a door, and you'd still feel a breeze through the window.

No," he said calmly, filled with purpose. he took her arms lightly in his hands and shook her. "I am not giving you up." Emily looked at him, and for just a moment he could read her thoughts. Melanie use to say they were like twins, with their own secret, silent language. in that instant, Chris felt her fear and her resignation, and the knotty pain of coming up against a brick wall again and again. She glanced away, and he could breathe again. "The thing is, Chris" Emily said, "it's not your choice.

Choices are funny things-ask a native tribe that's eaten grubs and roots forever if they're unhappy, and they'll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don't know there's an alternative, you can't miss it.

the letters are mixed up. U and I should be together.

I closed my eyes and curled my fists around the things I knew for sure: That a scallop has thirty-five eyes, all blue. That a tuna will suffocate if it ever stops swimming. That I was loved. That this time, it was not me who broke

If you don't believe in yourself, and you don't have the fortitude to make that dream happen, why should the hotshots in the publishing world take a chance on you? I don't believe that you need an MFA to be a writer, but I do think you need to take some good workshops.

I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.

Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong.

Sometimes Chris wished he could sneak a peek at the back of the book, so to speak, and see how it was all going to turn out, so that he wouldn't have to bother going through the motions.

Sometimes the key to happiness is just expecting a little bit less

Why are terms of endearment always food? Honey, cookie, sugar, pumpkin. Its not like caring about someone is enough to actually sustain you.

never trust a man who wears a pinkie ring. . . the only jewelry a guy should wear is a wedding band or a super bowl ring

Some people don't know what to do with an act of kindness.

You could only save someone that wanted to be saved; otherwise, you'd be be dragged down for the count, too.

She shrugged. "You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.

Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it.

sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them.

I don't believe in writer's block. Most of writer's block is having too much time on your hands. My mantra is that you can always edit a bad page; you can't edit a blank page.

But there's an enormous difference between an audience that's watching you because they can't wait to see what comes next and an audience that's watching you because they're waiting for you to fail.

When it's all over, you're remembered for what you did, not what you said you were going to do.

Honey, Kate is not going to die sooner because you have one more glass of mine, or because you stay overnight in a hotel, or because you let yourself crack up at a bad joke. So sit your ass back down and turn up the volume and act like you're a normal person.

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

How do you walk into someone's life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.

...when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.

Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's.

They say that there are moments that open up your life like a walnut cracked, that change your point of view so that you never look at things the same way again.

It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.

Is it really worth dying for the person you love?

I'm grateful for my children, who are slowly emerging to become their own wonderful, interesting, compassionate young adults - which makes me believe that along the way I must have done something right.

you never forget your first fall.

He insisted that stars were people so well loved, they were traced in constellations, to live forever