Quotes from Jodi Picoult

I personally subscribe to the belief that normal is just a setting on the dryer.

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn't all about me?

You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?

There are so many things I can't believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I'll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead of who they are. That happy endings don't have contingencies and conditions.

You build a wall to keep something unwanted out … or to hold something precious in.

The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.

I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet.

The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.

Beliefs are the roads we take to our dreams. Believe you can do something-or believe you can't-and you'll be right everytime.

Who I am, and what I am capable of doing has always managed to surprise me.

I don't know. But I do know that I'm at the stage of my life where I want forever , not right now . I know that the first person I kissed won't be nearly as important as the last person I kiss. And I also know better than to dream about things that can't happen.

I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.

That's what love is, when your hindsight is 20/20, and you still wouldn't change a thing.

No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.

On a really dark night, you can see between 1,000 and 1,500 stars, and there are millions more that haven't been discovered. It is so easy to think that the world revolves around you, but all you have to do is stare up at the sky to realize it isn't that way at all. -Brian Fitzgerald

When someone leaves you once, you expect it to happen again. Eventually you stop getting close enough to people to let them become important to you, because then you don't notice when they drop out of your world.

To be truly popular, it has to look like something you are, when in reality, it's what you make yourself.

Once upon a time there were two sisters. One of them was really, really strong, and one of them wasn't.' You looked at me. 'Your turn.' I rolled my eyes. 'The strong sister went outside into the rain and realized the reason she was strong was because she was made out of iron, but it was raining and she rusted. The end.' No, because the sister who wasn't strong went outside into the rain when it was raining, and hugged her really tight until the sun came out again.

It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there.

Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up.

That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.