Jodi Picoult Quotes

You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that

You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.. Jodi

When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.

When you love someone you let them take care of you.. Jodi Picoult

When you love someone you let them take care of you.

Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to

Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.

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

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

The scariest thing in the world is thinking someone you love is going to die.. Jodi

The scariest thing in the world is thinking someone you love is going to die.

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did

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?

You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in

You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.

I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to

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.

I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe

and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.

The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel.

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.

So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes,

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.

All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life

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.

Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came

Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.

If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.

This is love, I think. A place where people who have been alone may lock together like hawks and spin in the air, dizzy with surprise at the connection. A place you go willingly, and with wonder

Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were

Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.

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?

The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

Isn’t that what true romance is supposed to be about? Finding the person who’s your soul mate. Someone you dream about at night.Someone whose name is on your lips when you wake up in the morning.

words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.

The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.

Eric understands that the world is rarelythe way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don't have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.

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.

What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?

How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?

I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.

He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable

Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person.

My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn't a social construct but an instinct.

You know someone's right for you when the things they don't have to say are even more important than the things they do.

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

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

You don't have to say I love you to say I love you," you said with a shrug. "All you have to do is say my name and I know."

..."Can't you hear it?" you said. "When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.

Take 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.

Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.

Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way.

My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn’t all about me?

I don't know. But I do know that I'm at the stage of my life where I want forever, not right now.

I know that the first person I kissed won't be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.

And I also know better than to dream about things that can't happen.

Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far.

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

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. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.

If you're afraid of everyone leaving you, what do you do?"
Make them stay."
And if you can't do that, or don't know how to?"
Ellie shrugged. "I don't know."
Yes, you do. In fact, you've done it. You leave first," Coop said, "so you don't have to watch them walk away.

Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

if i'm going to fuck up my life, does it really matter which way i do it?.

The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do.

Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers, interrupt dinner.

She shrugged. "You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.

A very wise man once told me that you can't look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

There are so many things I can't believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I'll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead of who they are. That happy endings don't have contingencies and conditions.

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

A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.

Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.

You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.

And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.

The thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart of a soul mate.

I pointed to the wound. "It's missing," I said.

My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. "Yes," she said. "But see how much of me is left?

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.

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.

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

When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.

When it rains," her father said "it pours.

I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.

Since when does anyone get the option to do the easiest?

No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.

well, sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.

Cara: I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn't mean you're fearless. It just means you fear different things.

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

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

Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.

If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can't someone be healed by happiness?

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

But there’s a part of me that wonders what it would be like to be the most important person to someone else, to always feel like you were missing a piece of yourself when he wasn’t near you.

I realize that I quite like this girl. It’s not just that she’s so pretty the words fly out of my mind before they can leave my mouth - it’s that when we’re chatting, I feel like I’ve known her all my life.

If 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?

Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy's dying wish?

I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.

Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.

Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday.

Wenn jemand starb, dem du dein Herz geschenkt hattest, nahm er es dann mit?

I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?

A sacrament-like marriage-means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up.

Dr. Keller begins pacing. "I don't think we've been hearing Faith just right. Her guard...the words..they sound alike."

What do you mean?"

Your daughter," Dr. Keller says flatly. "I think she's seeing God.

Dylan Jerome," the lawyer admits, "wanted to sue God for not caring enough about him.

It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?

Hope 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.

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

She'd been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. 'You are so beautiful,' her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders.

'You are so full of shit,' Lila snarled, but as a contraction settled over her like a net, she bore down and pushed.

Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damagers awards.

The Lord turned water into wine. All I'm suggesting is a trip to the grocery store.

If I tell you another seven hundred times, maybe one of these days you might turn your clothes right side out when you put them in the hamper, eh?

I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.

It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place-because we become better people in it.

Somewhere along the line, organized religion stopped being about faith, and started being about who had the power to keep the faith. You said that the purpose of religion was to bring people together. But does it, really? Or does it-knowingly, purposefully, and intentionally-break them apart?

I have always envied people who believe strongly in religion, people who could face a tragedy by praying and know that it would be all right.

Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max's hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It's a note I have never heard - this chord of pure pain - and it takes a moment to realize it is coming from me.

The first time someone I loved left me behind...I didn't know how my family would balance. We had been such a sturdy little end table, four solid legs. I was sure we would now be off-kilter, always unstable. Until one day I looked more closely, and realized that we had simply become a stool.

males conspicuously leaving their mark to let others know where they weren't welcome.

because in the past words have only driven them apart.

This must be what an addict feels like, I think,
trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.

Once, I asked my mom why stars shine. She said they were
night-lights, so the angels could find their way around in Heaven.
But when I asked my dad, he started talking about gas, and somehow
I put it all together and figured that the food God served caused
multiple trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans: once you leave the litter, you sever contact with your mothers.

Go fuck yourself Judge."
"Motion denied." answers the judge dryly.

And if you don't find what you're looking for?"
At Roy's question Addie looked up.
"Then all I've lost is time.

Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and may be never really had.

She's not classically beautiful, but somehow that only makes her more interesting.

A woman isn't all that different from a bonfire. A fire's a beautiful thing, right? Something you can't take your eyes off, when it's burning. If you can keep it contained, it'll throw light and heat for you. It's only when it gets out of control that you have to go on the offensive.

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

People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don’t, how will they ever come to appreciate safety.

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.

She didn't like it when religious folks looked down on her for being an atheist; but to be honest, I didn't see how this was any different from the way she looked down on people for being Christians.

every now and then, i worry about people in the third world countries. and then i figure if they all started having sex, their lives would be considerably brighter.

I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet.

Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.

Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.

It's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works hard to keep things rolling smoothly, someone else sails along for the ride. Someone who would do anything to keep it the way it was in the beginning.

When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you don't just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can't be destroyed, just channeled into something else.

So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent I'd forgotten to communicate?

But Katie knew it was a sin, had known from the moment she made the decision to lie with Adam. However, the transgression wasn't making love without the sanction of marriage. It was that for the first time in her life, Katie had put herself first. Put her own wants and needs above everything and everyone else.

Even if we have grown so far apart that we don't recognize each other when we pass, we have this life, this block of time, and what do you think about that?

When I see him, his frame filling the doorway, I do not feel passion, excitement. I can't remember if I ever have. He makes me feel comfortable, like a favorite pair of shoes.

Scars are just a treasure map for pain you've buried too deep to remember.

I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.

You didn't get past something like that, you go through it - and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.

There are kinds of pain that you can't speak out loud.

It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don’t like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn’t speak that language. They didn’t learn it as children and they didn’t manage to pick it up as adults, either.

She knows the truth can cause a sharp pain behind your eyes and that love sometimes feels like a fist around your throat.

[There's a] point where you have to leave the dough alone. It's silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve.

I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.

If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related.

No matter what Joe Hoffman and Wade Preston say, it's not gender that makes a family; it's love. You don't need a mother and a father; you don't necessarily even need two parents. You just need someone who's got your back.

Then Henry speaks again. "Did he do it?"
I turn to him slowly. "Does it matter?

You want to know what I want? I'm sick of being a guinea pig. I'm sick, but I'm never f*cking sick enough for this family.

I'd do it all over again.

What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together? Bread, of course.

There are so many ways a family can unravel. All it takes is a tiny slash of selfishness, a rip of greed, a puncture of bad luck. And yet, woven tightly, family can be the strongest bond imaginable.

so familiar that you slide back to the place where you fit.

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

I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.

Edward: You know what the difference is between a dream and a goal? he used to say to me. A plan.

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.

The person may have a scar, but it also means they have a story

be a good listener, don't judge and don't put boundaries on someone else's grief.

Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river.

The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't see clearly?

Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation., and to others, like a pearl.

The best thing about endings is knowing that just ahead is the daunting task to start over.

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.

It's never the differences between people that surprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.

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

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend.

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound and more like a poultice.

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.

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.

Babies don't come with instruction booklets. You'd learn the same way we all do - you'd read up on dinosaurs, you'd Google backhoes and skidders. And you don't need a penis to go buy a baseball glove.

[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.

I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.

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.

Children are supposed to go to school, play on swing sets, skin their knees.

Logically, I understand that it wasn't Edward's fault my family fell apart after he left. But when you're eleven years old, you don't give a flip about logic. You just really miss holding your big brother's hand.

No child really chooses his religion; it is just the luck of the draw which blanket of beliefs you are wrapped in.

What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind - a trail made of stripped off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia - and who hands back each of these when its needed?

Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.

Was that all it took to be brave? Knowing that someone believed in you?

...courage wasn’t something you were bequeathed at birth, and it wasn’t a lack of fright. It was overcoming your fear, because the ones you love mattered more.

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

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.

History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination.

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.

The only monsters I have ever known were men.

My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.

Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.

In the space between yes and no, there is a lifetime. It’s the difference between the path you walk and one you leave behind; it’s the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; it’s the legroom for the lies you will tell yourself in the future.

I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.

I don't think we get a choice in who we fall for," Ian whispers. "I think we just do.

Quem diria que as palavras que nunca chegamos a dizer assentassem tão pesadamente?

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