Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Leave it to a man to mess things up

The first time someone I loved left me behind...I didn't know how my family would balance. We had been such a sturdy little end table, four solid legs. I was sure we would now be off-kilter, always unstable. Until one day I looked more closely, and realized that we had simply become a stool.

simply-quotes Follow I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.

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. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn't contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.

Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.

there's something nice about knowing that i'm not the only one who doesn't quite fit the part.

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.

In the space between yes and no, there is a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; it's the legroom for the lies you will tell yourself in the future.

In a lot of ways, having a teenager isn't all that different from having a newborn. You learn to read the reactions, because they're incapable of saying exactly what it is that's causing pain.

Life was all about being in a certain place, at a certain time.

It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.

Saying goodbye to the people you love isn't easy

I believe in Hell...but it's here on earth. He shakes his head. Good people and bad people. As if it were this easy. Everyone is both of these at once.

I never said I do not remember, my grandmother corrects. I said I prefer to forget.

Where you come from does matter -- but not nearly as much as where you are headed.

We have been naive enough to believe that we were invincible; that we could run blind through the hairpin turns of life at treacherous speeds and never crash.

The joke's on them. One little hypodermic wont' be enough. Split a piece of wood, and they'll find me. Lift up a stone, and they'll find me. Look in the mirror, and they'll find me...If you really want to know what makes someone a killer, ask yourself what would make you do it.

There's a] point where you have to leave the dough alone. It's silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.

Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.

God, what had we done? It didn't really matter. Piper had been the kind of friend with whom I didn't have to fill in the spaces with random conversation. It was okay to just be with her. She knew that sometimes I needed that - to not have to take care of anyone or anything, to simply exist in my own space, adjacent to hers.

Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.

When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.

If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.