Quotes from Jodi Picoult

How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.

If you had grown up with me, this is one of the things I would have tried to teach you: Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance.

God doesn't give people burdens they can't handle.

Did you ever think that maybe what you see isn't really what's true?

My grandmother told me that her father used to ask her a riddle: What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together? Bread, of course.

I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.

I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.

Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.

She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess.

She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.

Mistakes are something that happen by accident. You didn't walk out the door one morning and fall into some guy's bed. You thought about it, for a while. You made that choice.

Prejudice goes both ways, you know. There are people who suffer from it, and there are people who profit from it.

When this is over...we will got to the rainforest, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.

Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's cart, and say, Great. Maybe you can do a better job. Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.

Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's.

Here I am, wasting away inside a book I wish I could escape, and all she wants to do is stay in the story. If I could talk to this girl Delilah, I'd ask her why on earth she would ever trade a single second of the world she's in for the one in which I'm stuck

a public persona that might be different from what we truly feel inside... everyone wonders if they are good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, no matter how old they are. It is an archetypical moral dilemma - Do you act like yourself and risk becoming an outcast?

parenting isn't a noun but a verb--an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.

Just so you know, when they say once upon a time....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

If he says jump, she doesn't even ask How high? She goes out and buys a pogo stick.

when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.

I would rather be in minority and be right, than in the majority and wrong.

And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it's gone, so are you.