Quotes from Jodi Picoult

I think people assume death is all or nothing. Someone is here, or they're not. But that's not what it's like, is it? The echo of you is still here—in your children or grandchildren; in the art you made while living; in the memories other people have of you.

Babies don't come with instruction booklets. You'd learn the same way we all do -- you'd read up on dinosaurs, you'd Google backhoes and skidders. And you don't need a penis to go buy a baseball glove.

With these words Jake had let go of me. Which proved that he knew more about why I was leaving than even I did. I had believed that I was running away from what had happened. I did not know, not until I met Nicholas days later, that the whole time I was really running towards what was yet to be.

We could all be lucky. We could all be what we want to be, instead of who someone else told us to be.

Love makes life a little brighter

Babies are such blank slates. They don't come into this world with the assumptions their parents have made, or the promises their church will give, or the ability to sort people into groups they like and don't like. They don't come into this world with anything, really, except a need for comfort. And they will take it from anyone, without judging the giver. I wonder how long it takes before the polish given by nature gets worn off by nurture.

You may be real, but you're still stuck in a book.

You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.' How?' Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.

She's not like anyone I've ever seen before. When I'm not with her, I want to be. And when she opens the book and I see her face, I can barely remember what I'm supposed to say, much less how to speak at all. I test the words on my tongue. I think I might be in love with her. But how can I really know, since the only love I've ever experienced was written for me?

In the end, though, I did not kill my sister. She did it all on her own. Or at least this is what I tell myself.

Is it really worth dying for the person you love?" [Maureen] thinks about this for a moment. "That's not the real question, Oliver. What you should be asking is, Can you live without her?

What being home-schooled has taught me, more than anything, is what a waste of a life high school is.

I believed the reason there was a God was to prevent such atrocities from happening to the same person twice. But nothing prepared me for this: I have done what I've sworn I could never do; I have become my own nightmare... I have lost control.

That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes. I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

I watch her do the simplest things: brushing her hair into a ponytail, feeding the dog, tying Sophie's shoelaces, and I want to tell her what she means to me, but I never actually say the words. After all, to acknowledge Delia as a drug, I'd have to face the fact that one day I might have to go without her and this I can't do.

Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times I stayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that my father worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to come home to a house that felt too big for us.

Maybe if you spend your life pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren't really yours.

After all, once you know that part of something exists, it stands to reason that the rest of it is somewhere out there, too.

This is what it means to be human. We are all just canvases for our scars.

being a woman has meant being someone who gets talked over in conversations or ignored; someone who gets judged as a body instead of as a sentient soul; someone who, no matter who you are or what you are doing, always has to be on guard, lest someone else decide that you're going to be his victim.

It is strange to think that we might have crossed paths, and still not have known what we were missing.

It still hurts, she whispered. Even when you're doing it for someone else, that doesn't stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.

this was indeed some crazy world, where the waiting period to get an abortion was longer than the waiting period to get a gun.