Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.

Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you'd let them go. But now I look at you, and I dreamed about Maggie, and I see that I've been wrong. If you really love someone, Allie, I think you have to take them back.

He insisted that stars were people so well loved, they were traced in constellations, to live forever

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.

She was all the things I wasn't. And i was all the things she wasn't. she could paint circles around anyone; I couldn't even draw a straight line. She was never into sports; I've always been. Her hand, it fit mine.

He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable

I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.

If it had been easy for Romeo to get to Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up.

Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.

I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?

Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?

Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you'd start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number.

I know how difficult it can be when the image you've had of something doesn't match its reality; when the friend beside you turns into a monster.

People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.

What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person.

24/7) once you sign on to be a mother, that's the only shift they offer.

Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.

I thought lightning wasn't supposed to strike in the same place twice....sure it does...but only if you're too dumb to move.

Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength - and the honesty - to break them down.