Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Of course, that's not really accurate," Dr. DeSantos says. "The future is going to come, in some form, whether we like it or not. What we really mean is that we can't plan for the future. And when we can't plan—when we can't find those patterns that make sense—we lose the skeleton of life. And no one can remain upright without that.

It's post-traumatic stress disorder. When these women go ballistic and shoot their husbands or slice off their dicks, they aren't thinking about the consequences . . . just about stopping the aggression.

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. Alex had spent enough nights thinking of good fortune, of how it was thin as a veil, how seamlessly you might stream from one side to the other.

If you don't know where you've come from, how in Heaven's name will you ever figure out where you're going?

over five thousand years ago, in ancient China, mercury was used to induce abortions (although it most likely also killed the women). The Ebers Papyrus from 1500 B.C. mentioned abortions. He showed a slide of a bas relief from the year 1150 decorating the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where a woman in the underworld was getting an abortion at the hands of a demon.

Raw love, like raw heart-ache, could blindside you.

She'd thought that death could be an answer, because she was too immature to realize it was the biggest question of all. Yesterday

In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister.

I started to wonder what it might have felt like to live your life in a place someone else had carved.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.' – VOLTAIRE, FOR AND AGAINST

I look around at the curl of clouds in the sky, the sun glittering on the ocean in the distance. A picture postcard. Just a few hundred miles away this virus is killing people so fast that they don't have room for bodies, but you would never know it from where I stand.

heady rush to be the object of someone's attention in a good way, not as a freak, that I keep forgetting to hide.

She had pictured suicide as a final statement, a fuck you to the people who hadn't understood how hard it was for her to be the Josie they wanted her to be.

if my parents had their doubts about Hitler's vision for Germany, they appreciated his optimism and the hope that our country could regain its greatness.

There is a commotion as the reporters vie for Eric's sound bite. Gradually, the crowd falls back to allow Emma Wasserstein passage. She shakes Eric's hand, and Chris's, and then leans forward to give Eric's briefcase back to him. But as she does, she comes close enough to whisper to me. Mr. Hopkins, she says, a truth meant only for me, I would have done it, too.

I have this math teacher, Mr. Allen. He said that when you're a point, all you see is the point. When you're a line, all you see is the line and the point. When you're in three dimensions, you see three dimensions and lines and points. Just because we can't see a fourth dimension doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means we haven't reached it yet.

Nobody's birthday.

What she really meant was: here is my heart, have a care.

But forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself.

Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn't even any guilt.

Hold a thought in your head, and that was enough to change the actions of anyone and anything that crossed your path.

Survivors who look perfectly fine on the outside can still be emotionally empty at the core. And because of that, they can't always connect with their kids or their spouses—or they make the conscious decision not to connect, so that they don't fail the people they love.

The reason it's important to believe in something, he said, is because you can.

You could lose track of someone when you blinked