My teacher in first grade said that long ago people used to believe all kinds of things, because they didn't know any better. Like you shouldn't take a bath, because it could make you sick. And then someone saw germs under a microscope and started to think differently. You can believe something really hard, and still be wrong. (Faith White)
Jodi PicoultThe world just feels different for those of us who come alive after dark. It's more fragile and unreal, a replica of the one everyone else inhabits.
Jodi PicoultI'm telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they'd conclude that most people had children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn't one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren't very flattering.
Jodi PicoultBelieve me, Being gay is not a choice. Noone would choose to make life harder than it has to be.
Jodi PicoultThe legal system works really well, if you communicate a certain way. But if you don't, it all goes to Hell in a handbasket really quickly.
Jodi PicoultWhen someone loves you up one side and down the other like that, you make every effort to stick around.
Jodi PicoultA duck walks into a bar and the bartender asks, what'll it be? The duck doesn't answer because it's a duck.
Jodi PicoultI thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?
Jodi PicoultI shouldn't have eavesdropped, but sometimes, that's the only way to find out the truth.
Jodi PicoultWhat she couldn't put into word was what had happened in between to change her from one person into the other
Jodi PicoultI wonder if you've got a minute." I have many minutes, all of them used toward a common purpose.
Jodi PicoultA girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating.
Jodi PicoultThere are so many ways to betray someone. You can whisper behind his back. You can deceive him on purpose. You can deliver him into the hands of his enemy, when he trusts you. You can break a promise. The question is, if you do any of those things, are you also betraying yourself?
Jodi PicoultTake it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.
Jodi PicoultWhen we're awake, we see what we need to see. When we're asleep, we see what is really there.
Jodi PicoultI knew her well enough to understand that when Delia pushed you away, it was her way of making sure she didn't get shoved first.
Jodi PicoultTeachers deserve respect," I explain. "Why do they get it for free, when everyone else has to earn it?
Jodi PicoultHope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital... Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain.
Jodi PicoultThere was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher.
Jodi PicoultA lot of the moms of autistic kids I met are so consumed with being their child's advocate that there's no room for anything else - least of all themselves. It's why so many marriages end in divorce, when a child is diagnosed on the spectrum.
Jodi Picoulttrue love is felonious… You take someone’s breath away… You rob them of the ability to utter a single word… You steal a heart.
Jodi PicoultI 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.
Jodi PicoultCrazy girls did this, girls who walked like zombies through YA novels. But. Trixie felt the sting of the skin as it split, the sweet welling rise of blood. It hurt, though not as much as everything else idd.
Jodi PicoultWords got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.
Jodi PicoultThe question I hate the most is "How did you DO it - write novels and raise your children simultaneously!" I mean, do MALE authors get asked that??
Jodi PicoultKnowledge was power, but a good librarian did not hoard the gift. She taught others how to find, where to look, how to see.
Jodi Picoultby now you've already formed your own impression. you believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person's past has nothing to do with his future. you think i am either a hero, or a monster. maybe knowning more about circumstances will make you think differently about me, but it won't change what happened twenty-eight years ago.
Jodi PicoultThis was the reason there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that didn't have words big enough to describe them.
Jodi PicoultWhen you care more if someone else lives than you do about yourself- is that what [love is]?
Jodi PicoultPeople in the real world would kill for a happily ever after, and you're willing to just throw it away ?" I look away from her. "It's hardly a happily ever after when you wind up right at the beginning.
Jodi PicoultTurn around, and the people you thought you knew might change. Your little boy might now live half a world away. Your beautiful daughter might be sneaking out at night. Your ex-husband might by dying by degrees. This is the reason that dancers learn, early on, how to spot while doing pirouettes: we all want to be able to find the place where we started.
Jodi PicoultLove meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.
Jodi PicoultI know that there will be other women, but they couldn't compare. Maybe I'll change, maybe love will change, but I think we were a once-in-a-lifetime. You could never leave me; that's why I am not more upset. You can't possibly break these feelings. They stretch, and they last.
Jodi PicoultInside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.
Jodi Picoultwhen you want something so desperately, you shake with the need for it. you tell yourself that you don't need more than one sip, because it's just the taste you crave, and once it's on your tongue you will be able to make it last alifetime. you dream of it at night. you see a thousand mile-high obstacles between where you stand and what you want, and you convince yourself you have the power to hurdle them. you tell yourself this even when, leaping the first block, you wind up bruised and bloodied and flattened.
Jodi PicoultIf you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?
Jodi Picoult