Jodi Picoult Quotes

What if instead of focusing on what you don't have, you concentrate on what you've got?

There's no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn't nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would lead you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren't proud of.

I know better than most people that a criminal isn't always a thug in a black leather jacket with a big brand on his forehead to warn us away. Criminals sit next to us on the bus. They pack our groceries and cash our paychecks for us and teach our children. They look no different from you or me. And that's why they get away with it.

Good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.

Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.

There was, really, nothing you could use as a blueprint for your life, except your past. There was no starting over. There was only picking up the pieces someone had left behind.

I think that when you live in a world with limits... when you've met everyone and seem everything you're going to see - you lose the hope that something extraordinary will happen in your life

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

But what if your obsession has nothing to do with drugs or thrills or money? What if what you want most in the world is to recapture the way life was a week, a month, a year ago-and you are willing to do whatever it takes?

People change, but only if you give them room to do it.

If you focus on sandbagging the beachhead, you can ignore the tsunami that's approaching. Try it any other way and you'll go crazy.

History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.

Energy can't be destroyed, only converted into something different. So when a person dies, where does that energy go?

When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires.

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn't a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you'd been missing.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

Polar north can't get away from a magnet; the magnet finds it, no matter what.

When you have been burned by fire once, you don't leap into the flames again.

Dead isn’t angels or ghosts. It’s a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage.

The problem isn’t with rock lyrics, it’s with the fabric of this society itself.

There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you.

eskimos maybe? believed stars were holes in the sky where people who died could peek through at you

His hand is cool on my cheek as he paints a tear beneath my left eye, dark blue and swollen with sorrow.

The only monsters I have ever known were men.

I think her flaws make me love her even more. She's not perfect, but she's perfect to me

And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.

Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.

Just so you know, when they say "once upon a time"....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

I don't know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it's the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now...if she is somewhere. It's the question mark that comes with death that we can't face, not the period.

That's what love is. It's some power greater than you and me, that draws us to one special person

If words had flavors, hers would be bitter almonds and coffee grounds.

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.

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

Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?

I think that ordinary people who are placed in extraordinary circumstances find themselves pushed beyond their limits, and learn new truths about themselves.

Your problem is that you have been too honest for too long. Once you start doing it, lying is simpler than breathing.

There's some illogical part of me that still believes if you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving.

I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.

anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.

An apology with a defense built in isn't much of an apology

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child.

Religion was supposed to be a blanket drawn up to your chin to keep you warm, a promise that when it came to the end, you wouldn't die alone - but it could just as easily leave you shivering out in the cold, if WHAT you believed became more important than the fact THAT you believed.

Nathaniel closes his eyes and jumps, his arms glued to his sides like that fly's. He doesn't try to break his fall, just hits hard, because it hurts less than everything else.

Writing is grunt work - you need to have self-motivation, perseverance, and faith... talent is the smallest part of it.

The best way to prevent a heartache was to cushion the coming blow.

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

All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.