Quotes from Jodi Picoult

What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn't fit into? And the only way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your corners, sand yourself down, modify yourself to fit?

They both knew that jealousy could rise like a tide, erasing events that had been scratched into the shore of your memory.

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.

When he kissed me, it was with the desperation of a man who is trying to save himself.

I told you because I didn't know how not to.

I remember reading a novel once that said the native Alaskans who came in contact with the white missionaries thought, at first, they were ghosts. And why shouldn't they have thought that? Like ghosts, white people move effortlessly through through boundaries and borders. Like ghosts, we can be anywhere we want to be.

It's funny, how fast life changes. One minute you are present, and the next, you might find yourself futilely trying to get back to the world you were once part of. You might find yourself looking for people who can no longer hear you. You are in the world, but not of it.

It is also a terrifying prospect: that the relationships we use as cornerstones of our personalities are not given by default but are a choice... p 231

Do you even know what a salad is?" "Sure," Jordan said, smiling. "It's that stuff they invented a sneeze-guard for.

If you ask me who Ruth Jefferson was a month ago, I would have said she's a good nurse, and she's a good mother. But now I have people telling me I wasn't a good nurse. And if I can't put a casserole on the table and cloth on your back, then I have to second guess myself as a mother too. If you don't let me do this, if you don't let me take care of you, then I don't know who i'm suppose to be anymore.

don't know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it's the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now… if she is somewhere.

When Thomas left, it was with the feeling of a summer romance—a trinket that I could take out and examine for the rest of my life, the same way I might save a seashell from a beach vacation or the ticket from my first Broadway musical.

You know what my father used to say? True love is like bread. It needs the right ingredients, a little heat, and some magic to rise.

If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

Any smidgen of emotion revealed would crack the careful mask of control and leave the person in pieces.

I always get the funniest expressions from colleagues when I tell them that the best scientists understand that 2–3 percent of whatever it is they are studying is simply not quantifiable—it may be magic or aliens or random variance, none of which can be truly ruled out. If we are to be honest as scientists Ã¢â'¬Â¦ we must admit there may be a few things that we are not supposed to know. I

A flight attendant is the guide who helps you navigate that passage smoothly. As a death doula, I do the same thing, but the journey is from life to death, and at the end, you don't disembark with two hundred other travelers. You go alone.

I exist," he said softly.

If you can't fly, run. If you can't run, walk. If you can't walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.

Put ten people together in a Laundromat and chances are you won't be the one who's worst off

It worked out the way it should have

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.

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 lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next? p 418

The world is a place where the extraordinary can sit just beside the ordinary with the thinnest of boundaries.