Quotes from Jodi Picoult

People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. —NELSON MANDELA, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM

I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has its own zip code...You don't love someone because they're perfect...You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

If there's something as good as [him] in my life, I'm going to pay for it.

It's easy to say you will do what's right and shun what's wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there is no black or white. There are gradations of gray.

You saved me, I said. Nathaniel put his hands on either side of my face. I had to, he said. So you could save me back.

What's worse ...? The devil you don't know ... or the devil you do?

Words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder. Like falling in love or finding god, if it ha...ppens to you, you know what it feels like. But try to describe it to someone else - and language only takes you so far.

When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you don't just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can't be destroyed, just channeled into something else.

A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating.

What could you give me, I ask, my voice shaking, to make me forget ... that you forgot about me?

As it turns out, you can function while your heart is being torn to shreds.

If you want to see God laugh, make a plan.

Oh,that's right. You're a...what did you call it? Ah, a ghost hunter. You don't have to see things to believe them. Adam's gaze locked onto the persecutor's. Maybe you've got that backward, he said. Maybe it's just that I believe things you cant see.

Sometimes knowing what's right isn't a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all.

A wish is just words. Belief is the catalyst. It's what sets that wish into motion.

Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on.

You fell in love with someone because of the tilt of his smile, or because he could make you laugh, or in this case, because he made you believe that you were the only one who could save him.

There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future.

His grandmother had taught him that there was no such thing as coincidence. There are millions of people in this world, she had told him, and the spirits will see that most of them, you never have to meet. But there are one or two that you are tied to, and spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right.

Men. You can't live with them...and you can't legally shoot them. I tossed out my husband eight years ago and got a llama instead. Best decision I ever made.

The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.

The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

A world that was crowded with people could still be a very lonely place.

you can love a person and still hate the decisions they've made, can't you?