Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Hope is what makes you look outside the window to see if it's stopped raining. Hope is what makes you believe he'll text you back. Hope is why you buy your jeans a little tight... Hope is why you get out of bed in the morning, and why you dream at night. Hope is what makes us believe that things can only get better. Hope is what keeps us going.

Once, I asked my mom why stars shine. She said they were night-lights, so the angels could find their way around in Heaven. But when I asked my dad, he started talking about gas, and somehow I put it all together and figured that the food God served caused multiple trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.

Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.

Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.

She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life.

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend.

maybe there is more to a person than a body and a mind. maybe something else figures into the mix— not a soul, exactly, but a spirit that hints you might one day be greater, stronger than you are now. a promise; a potential.

You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.

Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together.

Words, for all they were flimsy and invisible, had great strength. They could be fortified as a castle wall and sharp as a foil. They could bite, slap, shock, wound. But unlike deeds, words couldn't really help you. No promise ever rescued a person; it was the carrying-through of it that brought about salvation.

Once you call something a story, it's set in stone. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that can't be transformed, because by definition, if you do that, it's not the same story anymore

When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.

But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? Whats stronger- the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Life is not a plot; it's in the details.

There are so many ways to betray someone. You can whisper behind his back. You can deceive him on purpose. You can deliver him into the hands of his enemy, when he trusts you. You can break a promise. The question is, if you do any of those things, are you also betraying yourself?

When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Being a teenager isn't all that different from being part of someone else's story. There's always someone who thinks they know better than you do

I'd like to say that this time I'd kill myself too..but I've never had that kind of courage.

There was a fine line between love and hate you heard that cliche all the time. But no one told you that the moment you crossed it would be the one you least expected. You'd fall in love and crack open a secret door to let your soul mate in. You just never expected such closeness one day to feel like an intrusion.

It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there's a whole story in who's left behind.

That's because racism isn't just about hate. We all have biases, even if don't think we do. It's because racism is also about who has power…and who has access to it.

Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.

You say you don't see color…but that's all you see. You're so hyperaware of it, and of trying to look like you aren't prejudiced, you can't even understand that when you say race doesn't matter all I hear is you dismissing what I've felt, what I've lived, what it's like to be put down because of the color of my skin.