Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Change your point of view, and the perspective is completely different.

Everything you're seeing up in the night sky happened thousands of years ago, because the light takes so long to reach us," Gabriel says. "I always thought it was so strange… that sailors chart where they're going in the future by looking at a map of the past.

After years of seeing the world in absolutes, he has taught me how to pick out all the shades of possibilities.

The whole point of this examination is to make me feel lesser than... but I have spent 20 years seeing how beautiful women are. Not because of how they look, but because of what their bodies can withstand.

You can't grieve something if you don't let yourself get close enough to care.

What you notice is the loneliness. Daniel started to isolate himself, because it hurt less than being pushed away.

the part of the brain, physiologically, that allows us to blame everything on people we do not really know is the same part of the brain that allows us to have compassion for strangers

But not all Jews were victims- look at Chairman Rumkowski, who sat safe with his new wife in his cushy home making lists, with the blood of my family on his hands. And not all Germans were murderers. Look at Herr Fassbinder, who had saved so many children on the night that children were taken away.

I'm at the age where that's a surprise, where I still think I'm going to see a younger woman rather than the one who blinks back at me.

What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a set of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.

Librarians were somewhat on a par with God-who else could be bothered with, and better yet, know the answers to so many different types of questions? Knowledge was power, but a good librarian did not hoard the gift. She taught others how to find, where to look, how to see.

Darkness, you know, is relative.

If you met a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they had tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

The thing about death is that we're all terrified of it happening, and we're devastated when it does, and we go out of our way to pretend that neither of these things is true.

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.

And sometimes, he was less lucid. He'd run around his cell like a caged animal; he'd rock back and forth; he'd swing from topic to topic as if it was the only way to cross the jungle of his thoughts.

I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?

My father looked right at me, but he didn't answer. And his eyes were dazed and staring through me, like I was made out of smoke. That was the first time I thought that maybe I was.

Children are the anchors of a mother's life. —SOPHOCLES, Phaedra, fragment 612

as it turned out, growing up was just as she'd feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head... or may be just your old ones, minus the hope.

What he did was wrong. He doesn't deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it's choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you....forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me. It's saying, You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.

On the day before classes were supposed to start, Mama took me out to dinner. "You're destined to do small great things," she told me. "Just like Dr. King said." She was referring to one of her favorite quotes: If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

Trying to figure out what happened to me isn't important. It's what I do with what I've learned that counts.