Jodi Picoult Quotes

I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them. Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.

Shooting stars are not stars at all. They re just rocks that enter the atmosphere and catch fire under friction. What we wish on when we see one is only a trail of debris.

The first time she kissed me, I truly thought I'd had an aneurysm - my pulse was thundering so loud and my senses were exploding. This, I remember thinking, the only word I could hold on to in a sea of feelings.

think about it: Romeo and Juliet bucked the system, and look where it got them. Superman has the hots for Lois Lane, when the better match, of course, would be with Wonder Woman.

Many of my books come from what if questions that I can't answer, things that I'm worried about as either a woman, a wife, a mom, an American.

Life can change in an instant.

Embarrassment isn't a just cause of action.

Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.

I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.

Some people, they get down in a hole so deep they can't figure out what to hold on to.

Yes, she is." He looks at me, his face carved in pain. "She is dying, Sara. She will die, either tonight or tomorrow or maybe a year from now if we're really lucky. You heard what Dr. Chance said. Arsenic's not a cure. It just postpones what's coming." My eyes fill up with tears. "But I love her," I say, because that is reason enough.

How do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she's stopped believing the impossible can happen?

She thought of death like the seam of a hem: each time you lose someone close, it unraveled a little. You could still go along with your life, but you'd be forever tripping over something you previously took for granted.

She stares at me for a moment, and then she bursts out laughing. “You haven’t seen his perfect little wife and his perfect little girls. Believe me, Oliver, I’m not the great love of his life, the one he’ll never forget.” “You are to me,” I say.

Here's what no one ever tells you about love: it hurts, having your heart broken

Objection!" Metz shouts. Grounds?" the judge asks. Well...he's my witness!

You can’t keep yourself from falling in love, but you can steer yourself away from the wrong people.

Summertime, I think, is a collective unconscious. We all remember the notes that made up the song of the ice cream man; we all know what it feels like to brand our thighs on a playground slide that's heated up like a knife in a fire; we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beating across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little longer than the last one, when in fact it's all going in the other direction.

There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.

But it was like wearing a size five sneakers when your foot is a seven- you can get by for a few steps, and then you set down and pull off the shoes because it just plain much

I have loved before, but it didn’t feel like this. I have kissed before, but it didn’t burn me alive. Maybe it lasts a minute, and maybe it’s an hour. All I know is that kiss, and how soft her skin is when it brushes against mine, and that, even if I did not know it until now, I have been waiting for this person forever.

It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A child was the love you didn't have to look for, didn't have to prove anything to, didn't have to worry about losing. Which is why, when it happened, it hurt so badly.

When you are attracted to people, it's because of the details. Their kindness. Their eyes. The fact that they can get you to laugh when you need it the most.

It was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearable sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet.

Just so you know, when they say "Once upon a time” . . . they’re lying

the relationship between people knot so easily, there needs to be a person skilled at working free the threads. Sometimes, though, the only way to extricate a tangle is to cut it out and start fresh.

i'm sure i'm worth a lot more dead than alive

Justification is a remarkable thing-takes all those solid lines and blurs them, so that honor becomes as supple as a willow, and ethics burst like soap bubbles.

Dark matter has a gravitation effect on other objects. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.

What's stronger-the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

The more you get past pain, the more it goes from coal to diamond.

There's a problem with wounded birds, Cassie," Connor said. "Either they fly away from you one day, or else they never get better. They stay hurt no matter what you do.

The problem was , you never heard anyone say,"wow, check out the brain on that babe.

You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.

I, um, I have this problem. I broke up with my boyfriend, you see. And I'm pretty upset about it, so I wanted to talk to my best friend. [...] The thing is, they're both you.

How foolish it is to run away with a man who's already run away with someone else.

Men. You can't live with them...and you can't legally shoot them. I tossed out my husband eight years ago and got a llama instead. Best decision I ever made.

Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.

So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.

You can touch everything and be connected to nothing.

For me, every book is a journey - questioning a really difficult topic that most people don't want to talk about, much less write about. And that's what I need; that works for me as a writer.

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.

It's choice that makes us human.

Campbell" Julia says "Don't do this to me" "Do what?" "Push me off the same cliff twice

I'm not saying you did the wrong thing. I'm not even saying it wasn't something I'd thought of doing, myself. But even if it was the just thing to do, or the fitting thing, it still wasn't the right thing.

There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.

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