Quotes from Jodi Picoult

When you don't know where you're headed, you find places no one else would ever think to explore.

You have to understand – there is a romance to Africa. You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the hand of God. You watch the slow lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heat, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world.

For someone who can't remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can't forget.

I know that there will be other women, but they couldn't compare. Maybe I'll change, maybe love will change, but I think we were a once-in-a-lifetime. You could never leave me; that's why I am not more upset. You can't possibly break these feelings. They stretch, and they last.

A heroin-thin boy with enough rings in his eyebrows to resemble a shower curtain rod...

A woman isn't all that different from a bonfire. A fire's a beautiful thing, right? Something you can't take your eyes off, when it's burning. If you can keep it contained, it'll throw light and heat for you. It's only when it gets out of control that you have to go on the offensive.

Someone once told me that when you give birth to a daughter, you've just met the person whose hand you'll be holding the day you die.

Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.

Even though the injury has faded, I still see it the way it was right after the accident: raw and red, a jagged lightning bold splitting the symmetry of my face. In this, I suppose I'm like a girl with an eating disorder, who weighs ninety-eight pounds but sees a fat person staring back at her from the mirror. It isn't even a scar to me, really. It's a map of where my life went wrong.

I closed my eyes and curled my fists around the things I knew for sure: That a scallop has thirty-five eyes, all blue. That a tuna will suffocate if it ever stops swimming. That I was loved. That this time, it was not me who broke

Close a door, and you'd still feel a breeze through the window.

This isn't a lie, actually. I don't care why Edward left. All I really want to know is why I wasn't enough to make him stay.

But still, it looked completely natural, as if we had been kissing at the ends of sentences for ages, while the rest of the world was still hung up on punctuation.

How could you beat an enemy you couldn't see?

I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.

you don't ever recover from losing someone you love—even the ones you leave behind because you're better off without them.

Just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way.

Here are the things I know for sure: When you think you're right, you are most likely wrong. Things that break—be they bones, hearts, or promises—can be put back together but will never really be whole. And, in spite of what I said, you can miss a person you've never known. I learn this over and over again

And naturally she wanted to believe she would have been a hero, when push came to shove. But you never knew what path you'd take until you got to that crossroads.

No matter how educated you are, no matter how irrational it seems, you will follow a glimmer of hope.

Nathaniel closes his eyes and jumps, his arms glued to his sides like that fly's. He doesn't try to break his fall, just hits hard, because it hurts less than everything else.

As anyone who's ever contracted it knows, lies are an infectious disease. They slip under the almond slivers of your fingernails and into your bloodstream.

We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn't really an answer to that question.

These days her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn't anymore.