Quotes from Jodi Picoult

We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.

Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you've got, instead of what you don't.

She became whoever she needed to be to survive,but she never let anyone else define her.

Isn't it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?

It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

It's the child who's supposed to cry, and the mom who makes it all better, not the other way around, which is why mothers will move heaven and earth to hold it together in front of their own kids.

Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday.

When the news you don't want to hear is looming before you like Everest, two things can happen. Tragedy can run you through like a sword, or it can become your backbone. Either you fall apart and sob, or you say, 'Right. What's next?

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

I had always been suspicious of women who described the dissolution of their marriages as something that happened overnight. How could you not know? I'd thought. How could you miss all those signs? Well, let me tell you how: you were so busy putting out a fire directly in front of you that you were completely oblivious to the inferno raging at your back.

There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you.

The best parenting advice I ever got was from a labor nurse who told me the following: 1. After your baby gets here, the dog will just be a dog. 2. The terrible twos last through age three. 3. Never ask your child an open-ended question, such as Do you want to go to bed now? You won't want to hear the answer, believe me. Do you want me to carry you upstairs, or do you want to walk upstairs to go to bed? That way, you get the outcome you want and they feel empowered.

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

Loneliness is a mirror, and recognizes itself.

Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.

Laws are black and white. The lives of women are a thousand shades of gray.

You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.

There are five things we need to say to people we love before they die…: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye.

The brain of a person in love will show activity in the amygdala, which is associated with gut feelings, and in the nucleus accumbens, an area associated with rewarding stimuli that tends to be active in drug abusers. Or, to recap: the brain of a person in love doesn't look like the brain of someone overcome by deep emotion. It looks like the brain of a person who's been snorting coke.

It takes two people to make a friendship work

My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.

Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.

Your religion should help you make the decision if you find yourself in that situation, but the policy should exist for you to have the right to make it in the first place. When you say you can't do something because your religion forbids it, that's a good thing. When you say I can't do something because YOUR religion forbids it, that's a problem.

when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see.