Quotes from Jodi Picoult

There's a foot of space and world of contrast between Cristina and me yet I too know how hard it is to peel back the veneer of your life and to peek at the real. It's like waking up in a room and getting out of bed and realizing the furniture has been completely rearranged. You will eventually find your way out but it will be slow going and you're bound to get some bruises along the way.

Anna is thirteen. Anna lives with her mother. Anna's mother is opposing counsel. How can Anna possibly live in the same home and not be swayed by Sara Fitzgerald?

even if we took every white supremacist on the planet and shipped them off to Mars, there would still be racism. That's because racism isn't just about hate. We all have biases, even if we don't think we do. It's because racism is also about who has power…and who has access to it.

How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been?

But passive racism? It's noticing there's only one person of color in your office and not asking your boss why. It's reading your kid's fourth-grade curriculum and seeing that the only black history covered is slavery, and not questioning why.

It seemed to Wren that having a mother had a lot less to do with a few sweaty hours of labor and delivery, and a lot more to do with whose face you always looked for in a crowd.

If you take away anything from this novel, I hope it is an awareness of the cognitive and emotional intelligence of these beautiful animals—and the understanding that it is up to all of us to protect them.

Well, as long as someone remembers you, you never really die.

and my mother raised me by herself, supporting us by hosting home parties to sell sex toys instead of Tupperware.

Can a person hold tightly to two thoughts that look, at first sight, as if they'd cancel each other out?

It's been forever.' The words are quiet, hidden against his shoulder. 'That's because,' Oliver says, 'you were waiting for me.' He slips aside the sweater again and kisses my collarbone.

To show compassion would elevate me from the monster he was. To show revenge would prove I'm no better. In the end, by using both, I can only hope they will cancel each other out.

Dying is a misnomer. You're alive, until you're not.

I hated him. Not for fooling me into trusting him, or even for beating me. But because he made me lose the compassion I had for the enemy.

I wondered how two boys - like Shay and me - could begin at the same point and somehow take turns that would lead us to be such a different men.

Antony was also obsessive, judgmental, and paranoid.

I just know that, at that moment, I remember feeling like the world had turned itself inside out. It's the child who's supposed to cry, and the mom who makes it all better, not the other way around, which is why mothers will move heaven and earth to hold it together in front of their own kids.

There's this weird part about having kids—you know when your family is finished, and when it's not.

Suddenly Izzy's future no longer seemed impossible. It felt like the stamp of a passport when you reached your own country, and realized that the only reason you'd traveled was to remember the feeling of home.

You trust someone who makes spaces for you in his or her life…so much so that if you leave, they will del the absence. You give someone your vulnerable, unshelled heart wrapped in a question: What will you do with it?

It turns out that I learned something from my dear old dad after all: firemen are experts at getting into places they shouldn't be.

Lucy} knew other things too, more important non-school things. She knew that when grown-ups lowered their voices it meant you had to listen harder.

You learn how they live their lives, and you speak their language well enough to blend in with them. But how many white people you know who go out of their way to see Tyler Perry movies so they can learn how to act around Black people?

priest said, 'What he did was wrong. He doesn't deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it's choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you.' I was thirteen, and I didn't know very much about the world, but I knew that if there was that much wisdom in religion, I wanted to be part of it.