Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Violence, from one angle, looked like mercy from another.

Hunger, she often tells me, has nothing to do with the belly and everything to do with the mind. What Mary really runs isn't a bakery, but a community.

What she couldn't put into word was what had happened in between to change her from one person into the other

Do you know what it's like to give your whole self to a person, and your whole heart to boot, until you've got nothing left to give- and then realize that it still isn't whay they need?

I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for - even if it's just a better tomorrow - is the most powerful drug on this planet.

That was how I learned that the world changes between heartbeats; that life is never an absolute, but always a wager.

I think about following her, but I want to give Zoe a minute alone with her mother. I want them to have the shift and redistribution of their relationship that I never got to have with my own mom, that acrobatic feat of love where everything is turned upside down and yet they are both still able to keep their balance.

She's not classically beautiful, but somehow that only makes her more interesting.

But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secretthat some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else's smile; that she was standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real…and who, when you got right down to it, didn't want to remember, because it hurt even more than this.

if you don't get sick, you won't get well.

You know why I think we still execute people? Because, even if we don't want to say it out loud-for the really heinous crimes, we want to know that there's a really heinous punishment. Simple as that. We want to bring society closer together-huddle and circle our wagons-and that means getting rid of people we think are incapable of learning a moral lesson. I guess the question is: Who gets to identify those people? And what if, God forbid, they got it wrong?

If you think about someone you've loved and lost, you are already with them.

Why is it that only in the very beginnings of a relationship are you aware of the heat coming from inside a person, of the number of inches you would have to move for your shoulders to brush as if it were an accident?

Water never stops moving. Rain falls, and runs down a mountain into a river. The river finds its way to the ocean. It evaporates, like a soul, into the clouds. And then, like everything else, it starts all over again.

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external...

If there's a physical component to falling in love—the butterflies in your stomach, the roller coaster of your soul—then there's an equal physical component to falling out of love. It feels like your lungs are sieves, so you can't get enough air. Your insides freeze solid. Your heart becomes a tiny, bitter pearl, a chemical reaction to one irritating grain of truth.

There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn't known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of a winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.

It feels like a punch. Tears fill my eyes, and I wonder how I could be upset over losing something I never had.

Maybe knowing where you belong is not equal to knowing who you are.

If we are meant to only have children who never encounter difficulty in life, then no one should be born.

The point is, if someone abandons you, it may be less about you and more about them.

You can be happy for someone else's good fortune but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.

Dr. Keller begins pacing. I don't think we've been hearing Faith just right. Her guard...the words..they sound alike. What do you mean? Your daughter, Dr. Keller says flatly. I think she's seeing God.

I'm not saying you did the wrong thing. I'm not even saying it wasn't something I'd thought of doing, myself. But even if it was the just thing to do, or the fitting thing, it still wasn't the right thing.