Quotes from Jodi Picoult

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive - the sum of the parts equal more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.

Risk always looks different when you're beating the system than when you've been beaten.

We all have things that come back to haunt us. Some of us just see them more clearly than others.

Why are terms of endearment always food? Honey, cookie, sugar, pumpkin. Its not like caring about someone is enough to actually sustain you.

You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to potentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.

It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place--because we become better people in it.

I don't want to make the same mistake twice. I don't want to tell myself it's over when it's not.

When you have been burned by fire once, you don't leap into the flames again.

Here's my question: What age are you when you're in Heaven?

what made you happy once might not make you happy now.

And he made love to her, offering his body in both tenderness and anger, unsure which was the best way to pass her bits of his soul so that she could patch her own with it

i don't need you. i never needed you. well, i fucking needed you!

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

I realized it was like looking into the sun—you shouldn't do it, because you'd turn your face away and be blind to everything else.

Your hand fits mine like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle

Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river.

You know what I noticed when I was with Jacob? In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There's the telephone, and the fax - and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way around the world. You've got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely.

How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?

If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.

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

I've never been in love, but I've always imagined it--weirdly--like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. Love, the host will say, makes life a little brighter.

You know how I get angry sometimes? That's because it's the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I'm really here.

They ask, how could this happen here? Well. How could it not happen here?