Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Home is not a place, but rather, the people you love

If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related.

Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers, interrupt dinner.

Campbell Julia says Don't do this to me Do what? Push me off the same cliff twice

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who wouldn't let go. We live in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.

You can't undo something that's happened; you can't take back a word that's already been said out loud.

Marina sighs. Love's a tidal wave, she says. Because it sweeps you off your feet? I ask. No. Because it sucks you under and you drown.

I knew her well enough to understand that when Delia pushed you away, it was her way of making sure she didn't get shoved first.

There are some weapons you can't protect yourself against.

What makes you walk past thirty-thousand people without a second glance, and then you look at the thirty-thousandth-and-first person and know you'll never take your eyes off her again?

Time is an optical illusion- never quite as soild or strong as we think it is

You can miss a person you've never known.

The way i see it, love is just a bigger, stickier form of trust.

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.

The desperate usually succeed because they have nothing to lose.

The real power of a wolf isn't in its fearsome jaws, which can clench with fifteen hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. The real power of a wolf is having that strength, and knowing when not to use it.

What he did was wrong. He doesn't deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it's choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you.

Some people don't know what to do with an act of kindness.

She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn't been thinking, she knew exactly what he'd felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.

The only difference between a wish and a prayer is that you're at the mercy of the universe for the first, and you've got some help with the second.

Here's what no one ever tells you about love: it hurts, having your heart broken

We're [parents]) always bluffing, pretending we know best, when most of the time we're just praying we won't screw up too badly.

Love is the most dangerous craving of all, if you ask me. It turns us into people we aren't. It makes us feel like hell, and makes us walk on water. It ruins us for anything else.

Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.