Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Just 'cause you can't see me don't mean I gone away.

During the night he'd kicked off a sock; his toes were plump as early peas; it was all she could do not to taste his caramel skin. So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him,you swallowed him whole. Love was sustenance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.

In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do.

There is nothing worse than silence, strung like heavy beads on too delicate a conversation.

If it's us, she whispered, how come you get to decide? When he didn't answer - couldn't answer - she turned and stared out the front window. As it turned out, they were still in the parking lot. They hadn't gotten anywhere at all.

When you lose someone you love, there is a tear in the fabric of the universe. It's the scar you feel for, the flaw you can't stop seeing. It's the tender place that won't bear weight. It's a void.

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital... Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain.

We are all flawed, complicated, wounded dreamers; we have more in common with one another than we don't. Sometimes making the world a better place just involves creating space for the people who are already in it.

Maybe the reason I've never died in this story is that I've never had something worth dying for before.

memory is linked to strong emotion, and that negative moments are like scribbling with permanent marker on the wall of the brain. But there's a fine line between a negative moment and a traumatic one. Negative moments get remembered. Traumatic ones get forgotten, or so warped that they are unrecognizable

The woman who opens the door has a blue stain on her shirt and dark hair wound into a messy knot and the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They're pale, like a lioness's, nearly golden, but they also look like they've done their fair share of crying, and we all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn't have any.

anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.

I don't know the first thing about holding together a family, especially one that resembles an heirloom vase, shattered but glued back together for its beauty, and no one mentions that you can see the cracks as plain as day.

It was almost as if there was a tear in the fabric I was made of, and he was the only color thread that would match to stitch it back up.

If words had flavors, hers would be bitter almonds and coffee grounds.

You came back fighting and furious at me. You told me you'd been looking for mermaids, and I interrupted you. [...] I said that next time, you had to take me with you. Was there a next time? Well, you tell me, you don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?

She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.

There are some nights when you just want to know there's someone else besides you in this wide world.

You have everything, she said slowly, as if she were explaining the order of the world to a small child. A family, a great job, a lot of people who look up to you. You've got a place to go home to. She smiled a little. So go.

But mostly I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet. I still loved him. It felt like anything else permanent that has gone missing; a lost tooth, a severed leg. You might know better, but that doesn't keep your tongue from poling at the hole in your gum, or your phantom limb from aching.

Well, you have to find that rare someone for whom you're not putting on a show. Someone who shines a spotlight in your direction—not because you're who they need you to be, or who they want you to be…just because you're you.

But that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?

There is a gulf as wide as an ocean between should and want, and I am drowning in it.

There are so many ways a family can unravel. All it takes is a tiny slash of selfishness, a rip of greed, a puncture of bad luck. And yet, woven tightly, family can be the strongest bond imaginable.