Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Busy is just a euphemism for being so focused on what you don't have that you never notice what you do.

The truth is, I don't want to be disappointed again. Not by someone else's shortcomings, and especially not by my own.

the relationship between people knot so easily, there needs to be a person skilled at working free the threads. Sometimes, though, the only way to extricate a tangle is to cut it out and start fresh.

You can believe, for example, that a dead-end job is a career. You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to potentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.

I'm sorry. I love you, but it's an enormous conflict of interest. Her head snaps up, You love me? What? MY face is suddenly on fire. I never said that. You did. I heard it. I said I'd love to. No, Sage says, a grin splitting her face. You didn't. Did I? I'm so tired I don't know what the hell is coming out of my mouth. Which probably means that I don't have the faculties to cover up what I really feel for Sage Singer, with an intensity that terrifies me.

Falling is the first step in learning how to fly.

Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief.

And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. —KAHLIL GIBRAN The Prophet

Anna anna bo banna, banana fanna fo fanna, me my mo manna...Anna. Chuck! Do Chuck!

She falters, then gather up the weeds of her thoughts and offers me the saddest, truest bouquet.

In a cave at the far edge of the kingdom lived a man who had sworn off love. When you have been burned by fire once, you don't leap into the flames again.

Surely she knows --like I do--that fairy tales are just stories. That happy endings aren't real.

My whole life, this is how I've defined the paranormal: can't understand it, can't explain it, can't deny it.

Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows up and becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won't catch anyone's attention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.

An item that looks perfectly normal on the surface might only be disguised.

Stupid English. English isn't stupid, I say. Well, my English teacher is. He makes a face. Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me. Why not? He says lunch isn't a subject. I glance at him. It isn't. Well, Jacob says, it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?

If you ask me, music is the language of memory

Every life has a soundtrack.

Sometimes the hardest thing to hear is the truth.

When you look into your baby's eyes," Lacy said softly, "you see everything you hope they can be… not everything you wish they won't become.

Wondering why white people named girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience - names they could never live up to - and black mothers called their daughters Mercy, Deliverance, Salvation - crosses they'd always have to bear.

She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.

Jacob's room is the place entropy goes to die.

You okay in there? No, I'm hanging from a closet rod.