Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Now I know: adulthood is a line drawn in the sand. At some point, your child will be standing on the other side.

if you spend too much time living in the past, you never move forward.

All mothers worry, but Black mothers, we have to worry a little bit more. "Even walking can be dangerous. Just being can be dangerous, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it's your fault—that if you'd tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn't have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?

In my mind, Asperger's isn't a label to describe the traits Jacob has, but rather the ones he lost.

That if our legacy is not entitlement, it must be hope. Because if it's not, then we become the shiftless, the wandering, the conquered. We become what they think we are. —

Kiedy nie ma siÄ™ nic oprócz mÅ'otka, wszystko wyglÄ…da jak gwó?d?.

I glance at the house, dark and empty. Am I my sister's keeper? I say. Then I grin at her. If you feel like waiting, you can come up and see my etchings.

Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It's the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love. But just because you can't see it anymore doesn't make it any less real.

One person's disability is another person's culture." As

Children didn't make their own mistakes. They plunged into the pits they'd been led to by their parents.

In brain scans, music lights up the medial prefrontal cortex and triggers a memory that starts playing in your mind. All of a sudden you can see a place, a person, an incident. The strongest responses to music—the ones that elicit vivid memories—cause the greatest activity on brain scans.

I also know that when you're in the thick of living your life, you don't often get to push pause and reflect on it. It's just really hard to sit in the moment, and not worry if pause is going to turn into stop.

whenever people start talking about curing too many things with science, I'm always glad bioethics wasn't

I was starting to see that the past might color the future, but it didn't determine it. And if I could believe that, it was much easier to let go of what I'd done wrong.

Sometimes making the world a better place just involves creating space for the people who are already in it.

IT'S RAINING.

The loneliest creature on earth is a whale that has spent more than twenty years calling out for a mate, I read, but whose voice is so different from those of the other whales that none of them ever respond.

where all the differences in schooling and money and skin colour evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another.

not for the first time I think that someone's enterprising idea of therapy is another person's frustrated hell.

Everyone comes with a label, it's up to you to peel it off.

But I do know that my own shittiest days were usually followed by better ones.

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

If you don't want someone to change your life for you, you've got to change it yourself.