Quotes from Jodi Picoult

This is true of anyone: the music we choose is a clear reflection of who we really are.

I didn't want to be treated like him," Josie said, answering her mother, when what she really meant was, I wasn't brave enough.

Home is the place where you know where the silverware lives, where the cups hide, where the clean plates go.

Do you have kids? Anna asks. I laugh. What do you think? It's probably a good thing, she admits. No offense, but you don't exactly look like a parent. That fascinates me. What do parents look like? She seems to think about this. You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across? Like that.

There is a picture of me from that day. I saw it once on a PBS documentary about April 15, 1945, when the first British tanks approached Bergen-Belsen.

the breeze would draw a violin bow across the branches of a tree and I would again hear her lullaby. I would listen to the chime of coins being counted, and I would imagine her laughter. Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.

How do you do it? I ask softly, and I'm no longer asking just about her and Josef but about myself as well. How do you get up every morning and not remember?

She didn't like it when religious folks looked down on her for being an atheist; but to be honest, I didn't see how this was any different from the way she looked down on people for being Christians.

The reason I am still sitting at Josef's kitchen table is the same reason traffic slows after a car wreck—you want to see the damage; you can't let yourself pass without that mental snapshot. We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it.

No matter what we survivors like to tell ourselves about the afterlife, when someone dies, everything is over.

If you forgive people enough, you belong to them, and they to you, whether either person likes it or not--squatter's rights of the heart. -James Hamilton

I wont let you fall, he said, and because he never did, the world from that vantage point stops being so crazy.

seeing Darija or doing anything but my

I do what I do best. I move in the opposite direction.

doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there.

We fall back into silence. I look around XO Cafe and notice that chatter happens mostly at tables where the diners are young and hip. The older couples, the ones sporting wedding bands that wink with their silverware, eat without the pepper of conversation. Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?

If you sit around and think about how hot the fire's going to be, you'll never get into the thick of it.

Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up. I

Life was what happened when all the what-if's didn't, when what you dreamed or hoped or—in this case—feared might come to pass passed by instead

Piety and pity were a little to close to each other for my tastes.

I don't believe in God. But sitting there, in a room full of those who feel otherwise, I realize that I do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds. I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for—even if it's just a better tomorrow—is the most powerful drug on this planet.

In every fairy tale, the only way out is to keep running forward. To never look back.

Either you dissolve into a puddle, or you take the blow on the cheek and force yourself to lift your face again for more.

When you die, you die. And everything is over.