Quotes from Jodi Picoult

for 100,000 (dollars), you [can] flatten a house with a wrecking ball. Imagine how much less it [takes] to destroy something than it [does] to build it in the first place.

Even the most beautiful things can be toxic.

My teacher in first grade said that long ago people used to believe all kinds of things, because they didn't know any better. Like you shouldn't take a bath, because it could make you sick. And then someone saw germs under a microscope and started to think differently. You can believe something really hard, and still be wrong. (Faith White)

It's never the differences between people that suprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

If you never go out on that limb, you're missing a hell of a view.

Well I talk a little about that, but I don't admit that from the beginning I knew we were not meant to be together.

Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, this too shall pass - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

Add love, and all the lines between right and wrong were bound to disappear.

There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.

The scariest thing in the world is thinking someone you love is going to die.

A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes...And a good mother is someone whose child wants to follow her.

You know how I see it? There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing--light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light...I guess from my point of view, we can choose to be in the dark, or we can light a candle. And for me, Christ is that candle.

Prayer is like water - something you can't imagine has the strength or power to do any good, and yet give it time and it can change the lay of the land.

In my previous life I was a civil attorney. At one point I truly believed that was what I wanted to be- but that was before I'd been handed a fistful of crushed violets from a toddler. Before I understood that the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art.

Sometimes all you need to live one more day is a good reason to stick around.

Love has nothing to do with what you're looking at and everything to do with who's looking.

Anna is the only proof I have that I was born into this family. Instead of dropped off on the doorstep by some Bonnie and Clyde couple that ran off into the night. On the surface, we're polar opposites. Under the skin, though, we're the same: people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong. (Jesse)

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn't a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you'd been missing.

If history has a habit of repeating itself, doesn't someone have to stay behind to shout out a warning?

The thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart of a soul mate.

I pointed to the wound. It's missing, I said. My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. Yes, she said. But see how much of me is left?

don't say it. don't tell me that nobody's going to stare at me, because they will. don't tell me it doesn't matter, because it does. and don't tell me i look fine because that's a lie.

sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them.

I tell you this as a cautionary tale: beware of getting what you want. It's bound to disappoint you.