Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

Power isn't about doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

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

If you were drifting with a thousand other people, could you really still say you were lost?

One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.

Once, in second grade, Kate drew a picture of a firefighter with a halo above his helmet. She told her class that I would only be allowed to go to Heaven, because if I went to Hell, I'd put out all the fires. ~Brian Fitzgerald

If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.

You can make it dark, but I can't make it light.

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

People changed. Even the people you thought you knew as well as you knew yourself.

I am Alice in Wonderland', Josie thought. 'Watch me fall.

A very wise man once told me that you can't look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

I don't know what you think of me. And you certainly would never picture us together. But probably peanut butter was just peanut butter for a long time, before someone ever thought of pairing it with jelly. And there was salt, but it started to taste better when there was pepper. And what's the point of butter without bread? (Why are all these examples of FOODS?!!?!?!?!?!?!) Anyway by myself I'm nothing special. But with you I could be.

Torn between fear and something that resembled love, she wrestled with questions she never dreamed she would face: How could she leave? Then again, how could she stay?

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.

There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?

When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires

It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn't.

When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.

You can believe something really hard,' Faith says, 'and still be wrong.

There are millions of people in the world, and the spirits will see that most of them you never have to meet. But there are one or two you are tied to, and the spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right.

When she wanted to escape her life, she read books

He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B.

Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.