Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Betrayal was a stone beneath the mattress of the bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details.

But kids don't stay where they're supposed to. You turn around and find her not in the bedroom but hiding in a closet; you turn around and see she's not three but thirteen. 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.

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?"  Ã¢â'¬Â¢

Isn't that a little Old Testament for a nun?" "Ex-nun. And let me tell you, that serenity crap from The Sound of Music? Bullshit. Inside the cloister, the sisters are just as petty as people on the outside. There are some you love and some you hate. I did my share of spitting in the Holy Water font before another nun used it. It was totally worth the twenty rosaries I said for penance.

Because race is different. Racism is different. It's fraught, and it's hard to discuss, and so as a result we often don't.

that allows us to have compassion for strangers. Yes, the Nazis made Jews the scapegoats, to the point of near extinction. But that same bit of tissue in the mind is what led others to send money and supplies and relief, even when they were half a world away.

we have more in common than we have differences.

And then he remembered that in the outside world, no one had to unlock a door before he entered

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 strangehold on me. It's saying, You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future

It's not that he doesn't love you enough to tell you the truth," she said. "It's that he loves you too much to risk it.

What good was a personal victory to someone who'd spent her life losing herself for the greater good of everyone else?

were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations. Once, at a neighborhood dinner party, Lacy had asked him what happened if you had no expectations. You couldn't divide by zero. Did that mean if you just let yourself roll with all of life's punches, you could never be happy?

Sometimes when you pick up your child, you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood. Finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.

Saugumas-tik miražas; vargu ar turi reikšm?s, kad esi pririštas, jei kitas lyno galas atsirišo.

I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way. "But," she continued, "don't forget where you came from.

But I'm even more cautious with the white ones in the pickup trucks with Confederate flags hanging in the back windows. Because I used to be who they are, and I know what they are capable of.

Could love be not grand gestures or empty vows, not promises meant to be broken, but instead a paper trail of forgiveness?

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

sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them. My

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

He was the kind of dog whose heart was too big for his own body, and so he continuously offered it up to me.

I catalog the breadth of his shoulders, the damp curls at the nape of his neck; the way the tendons in his forearms shift and play as he scrolls through his texts. It's shocking, sometimes, to be confronted with this when a second ago he sat on my shoulders, trying to pull down a star and unravel a thread of the night.

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