Quotes from Jodi Picoult

What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too.

Infatuation's just another word for not seeing clearly. When you start to love a person- that's when they become real

Just because you had every right to feel sorry for yourself didn't mean you ever took the opportunity to do so.

It's crazy, right? To love someone who's hurt you? It's even crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you.

No, he said calmly, filled with purpose. he took her arms lightly in his hands and shook her. I am not giving you up. Emily looked at him, and for just a moment he could read her thoughts. Melanie use to say they were like twins, with their own secret, silent language. in that instant, Chris felt her fear and her resignation, and the knotty pain of coming up against a brick wall again and again. She glanced away, and he could breathe again. The thing is, Chris Emily said, it's not your choice.

And oh she had been broken. She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall

I wonder if what makes a family a family isn't doing everything right all the time but, instead, giving a second chance to the people you love who do things wrong.

Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids... but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life.

My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it's faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.

You don't love someone because they're perfect, she says. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not. I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after thirty-five years that the sky, which I've seen as a brilliant blue, is in fact rather green.

The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn't disappointed.

What you had could never make up for what you'd lost.

But there is a different between mending someone who's broken and finding someone who makes you complete.

Sometimes the key to happiness is just expecting a little bit less

She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.

you're not a bad person because you want to be yourself.

Even though it hurt, there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.

I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live

If the past few months have taught me anything, it's that friendship is a smoke screen. The people you think are solid turn out to be mirrors and light; and then you look down and realize there are others you took for granted, those who are your foundation.

It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A child was the love you didn't have to look for, didn't have to prove anything to, didn't have to worry about losing. Which is why, when it happened, it hurt so badly.

I know better than most people that a criminal isn't always a thug in a black leather jacket with a big brand on his forehead to warn us away. Criminals sit next to us on the bus. They pack our groceries and cash our paychecks for us and teach our children. They look no different from you or me. And that's why they get away with it.

When I'm with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that's backing up.

He's not your typical prince, more like a square peg in a round hole, kind of like me. He's the sort of guy who wouldn't mind reading side by side on a date.

She shrugged. You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.