Quotes from Jodi Picoult

After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken.

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.

Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up.

Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.

Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.

It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.

In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn; color your hair; watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five. In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world; or you can just jump off it.

It's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you.

I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.

Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.

I learn from my own daughter that you don't have to be awake to cry.

Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.

Do you know what it's like to love someone so much, that you can't see yourself without picturing her? Or what it's like to touch someone, and feel like you've come home? What we had wasn't about sex, or about being with someone just to show off what you've got, the way it was for other kids our age. We were, well, meant to be together. Some people spend their whole lives looking for that one person. I was lucky enough to have her all along.

Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?

I don't think we get a choice in who we fall for, Ian whispers. I think we just do.

See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it

You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake.

So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.

A real friend isn't capable of feeling sorry for you.

Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?

Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.

How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?

If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.