Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Skin color doesn't make you different,' Melody said. 'We're all the same on the inside.' 'The only people who ever say that,' Raymon replied, 'are white.

it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.

Dealing with an autistic meltdown is like dealing with a tornado. Once you are close enough to see it coming, there's nothing to do but weather the storm.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? —REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR

She was making a conscious effort to take with her all the best things about the world she wanted to leave, just in case memories could be car-ried in one's pockets and used to plot out the course of whatever it was that came next

history has a habit of repeating itself, doesn't someone have to stay behind to shout out a warning? If not me, then who?

Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

But you know, the word ignorance has an even more important word at its heart: ignore. And I don't think it's right to ignore the truth any longer.

Suddenly the guy looked up, his blue eyes catching mine. They made me think of the heart of a glacier, of how, when you touch dry ice with your bare skin, you cannot let go even if you try.

His stone walls are knee-high, not castle-worthy. They have large gaps in them for driveways and paths and grape arbors. And yet every time he drives past a property he's shaped with his own heavy hands, he pictures the parents sitting down to dinner with their children, harmony wrapping the table like mosquito netting as if literal foundations might lay the pattern for emotional ones.

This is my favorite part about brioche. The dough doesn't quite know what to do with all that butter, and begins to come apart. But with enough time, it manages to bring itself back to center, to a satin consistency. I

So you see, the real question isn't how I left this world to go to the woods. It's how I made myself come back.

Let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: It solidifies into something else. Not grief, like you'd expect, or even regret. No, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn't until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tongue that you realize this is anger in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measured and spread.

monsters I have ever known were men," I said.

He taught me that if a body is easily crushed, it develops a weapon to prevent that from happening.

When my mother was in the hospital," I say, "her rabbi told her a story. In Heaven and Hell, people sit at banquet tables filled with amazing food, but no one can bend their elbows. In Hell, everyone starves because they can't feed themselves. In Heaven, everyone's stuffed, because they don't have to bend their arms to feed each other.

Fake it until you make it, she said.

This is what it means to be human, Bex thought. We are all just canvases for our scars.

Stop trying to act like nothing happened. Because something did, and you can't make it go back to being the same

It's almost as if I had to stop running in order to see myself clearly, and what I see is a person who's been driving toward a goal for so long she can't remember why she set it in the first place.

really wanted Sage Singer to prove me wrong.

Do you know what it's like to love someone so much, that you can't see yourself without picturing her? Or what it's like to touch someone?

There are three choices for a woman like me: 1) Be sad and lonely 2) Be the one who is cheated on 3) be the other woman

Even the smartest person in the world could be scared by what he did or did not understand.