Jodi Picoult Quotes

It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.

The book that made me want to be a writer in the first place was Gone with the Wind - I read it and wanted to create a whole world out of words, too.

You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever

In this new place we've found, sometimes there aren't words, because the truth can be even more difficult than the lies.

it was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.

When I was little, the great mystery to me was not how babies were made, but why?

It is a remarkable question- Do all the wonderful things happen when we are not aware of them?

what made you happy once might not make you happy now.

Even the most beautiful things can be toxic.

See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it

Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you'd start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number.

You can’t undo something that’s happened; you can’t take back a word that’s already been said out loud.

Here's my question: What age are you when you're in Heaven?

No matter how much you consumed, you would not have your fill.

On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive - the sum of the parts equal more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.

You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

The English judged a person so that they'd be justified in casting her out. The Amish judged a person so that they'd be justified in welcoming her back. Where I'm from, if someone is accused of sinning, it's not so that others can place blame. It's so that the person can make amends and move on.

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

I learned a long time ago with you that folks who were trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you've done your job - no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.

Shelby believed that love was like a solar eclipse - breathtakingly beautiful, absorbing, and capable of rendering you blind. She had not necessarily gone out of her way to avoid a relationship, but she hadn't wanted on either. It was called falling in love for a reason - because, inevitably, you crashed at the bottom.

It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's.

When you love someone, you don't see parts of him you don't like.

Just because you had every right to feel sorry for yourself didn't mean you ever took the opportunity to do so.

In the end, though, I did not kill my sister. She did it all on her own. Or at least this is what I tell myself.

Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids... but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life.

I used to think I'd be just like them when I grew up, but I am not. And the thing is, somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be like them, anyway.

When I'm with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that's backing up.

All it takes is a second and your whole life can get turned upside down.

By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.

I think...she said finally, "that all of us have got our ghosts.

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

‎Pick 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.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?

In America right now, the people who talk about race the most are people of color - and if we are going to move the needle forward, it's WHITE people who need to acknowledge their role in racism.

What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.

Many trees have died so that the Catholic Church can preach against homosexuality.

There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.

I used to pretend that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one.

How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

I smiled at him as best I could and pushed the paper across the table before he could change his mind. Because Henry DeVille was correct - there was an ingredient in my baking more concenctrated than any extract, more pungent than any spice; an ingredient that everyone would recognize and no one was able to name: it was regret, and it rose when one least expected.

Everyone has a book inside of them - but it doesn't do any good until you pry it out.

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was... ...Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up. I sat between my mother and my father, watching strangers on TV carry in Shaker rockers and dusty paintings and ancient beer tankards and cranberry glass dishes; people and their hidden treasures, who had to be told by experts that they'd taken something incredibly precious for granted.

I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.

Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.

What if it turns out that a life isn’t defined by who you belong to or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you’ve lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next?

I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room-but eventually, you learn to live with it.

I am an activist. I have a really big pulpit with my fiction and I love knowing that I can make people think.