Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Nobody," Sage reads, "who looks at a shard of flint lying beneath a rock ledge, or who finds a splintered log by the side of the road would ever find magic in their solitude. But in the right circumstances, if you bring them together, you can start a fire that consumes the world.

To us, summer was a verb

If you had the chance, would you change what you did? We haven't rehearsed the answer, and maybe it's the only one that really matters. I turn, so that I am staring square at you; so that you know, all my life, anything I've ever said or buried beneath silence was just for you. If I had the chance, I reply. I'd do it all over again.

She spent the rest of her time holding on to whatever scraps she had left.

He presses himself so close to me that any hurt left on the surface between us spreads thin, becomes a binding instead of a boundary

The worst thing about endings is knowing that just ahead is the daunting task of starting over.

We're conditioned to seeing men holding guns, but not men holding hands.

At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you became as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked this too shall pass - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something that everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgettingone how painful it had been at the time.

It makes me wonder how I'd be treated if I were like everyone else. Maybe I'm a pretty rotten person, not that anyone would ever have the guts to tell me this to my face. Maybe everyone thinks I'm rude or ugly or stupid but they have to be nice because it could be the circumstances of my life that make me that way.

Truth expands until it can choke you.

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

The human capacity for burden is like bamboo – far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance.

Like Daniel, Jason had learned the hard way that we are never the people we think we are.

The papers were caught between our bodies, a wedge to drive us apart, like any other lie.

The feeling that she was going to explode, that she was too big for her own skin.

Chosen protection.

Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe

Truth vibrates when it's drawn across the bow of pain.

If you chose to stop a loved one's suffering—either before it began or during the process—was that murder, or mercy?

By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All

But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.

It turned out people truly did cry into their coffee cups.

She loved knowing that if she worked hard enough, at the end there was going to be an answer that made sense.

Actually, she liked math. She loved knowing that if she worked hard enough, at the end there was going to be an answer that made sense.