Jodi Picoult Quotes (175 Quotes)

A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating.

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

I have only known her for two years. But if you took every memory, every moment, if you stretched them end to end-they'd reach forever.

It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.

May be there are entire worlds where there are no fences, where feeling bears you like a tide.

The nurses, I have already learned, are the ones who give us the answers we're desperate for. Unlike the doctors, who fidget like they need to be somewhere else, the nurses patiently answer us as if we are the first set of parents to ever have this kind of meeting with them, instead of the thousandth.

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut.

If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.

There 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.

My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasnÆt all about me?

A heroin-thin boy with enough rings in his eyebrows to resemble a shower curtain rod...

He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat.

I learn from my own daughter that you don't have to be awake to cry.

It feels like we are sitting on the tight bench of a bus with a stranger between us, one that neither of us is willing to admit or mention, and so we find ourselves talking around him and through him and sneaking glances when the other one isn't looking.

Maybe if God gives you a handicap, he makes sure you've got a few extra doses of humor to take the edge off.

There are always sides. There is always a winner and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.

You can make it dark, but I can't make it light.

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?

They ask, how could this happen here? Well. How could it not happen here?

No matter who you are, there is always some part of you that wishes you were someone else, and when, for a millisecond, you get that wish, it's a miracle.

A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead.

Her hair is longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of words I was not around to hear.

I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgotten by most everyone.

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

Maybe if you spend your life pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren't really yours.

There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots s there are in the bright ones.

You can't pay a landlord in dogma.

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

To be truly popular, it has to look like something you are, when in reality, it's what you make yourself.

She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess.

A real friend isn't capable of feeling sorry for you.

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

I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. And sometimes it's not for quite as long as we would have expected or hoped. But it is still far better than never having had those children at all

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

My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding my father's shoulders at twilight, when I knew that if I held up my hands and spread my fingers like a net, I could catch the coming stars.

There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.

You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake.

Isn't it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?

What she hadn't realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you'd felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.

She was all the things I wasn't. And i was all the things she wasn't. she could paint circles around anyone; I couldn't even draw a straight line. She was never into sports; I've always been. Her hand, it fit mine.

And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it's gone, so are you.

How am I suppose to think about Anna Fitzgerald when I'm wondering whether Julia has ever woken up in someone's arms and for just a moment, before the sleep cleared from her mind, thought maybe it was me?

I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere.

It is so easy to think that the world revolves around you, but all you have to do is stare up at the sky to realize it isn't that way at all.

My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it's faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.

There are two reasons not to tell the truth--becuase lying will get you what you want, and because lying will keep someone from getting hurt.

You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?

It reminded Lacy of running into someone you hadn't seen for a while, and finding her bald and missing her eyebrows: you knew she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but pretended you didn't, because it was easier that way for both of you.

What's the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you're faking.

The mind is a remarcable thing. Just because you canÆt see the wound doesnÆt mean it isnÆt hurting