Quotes from Jodi Picoult

She'd been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. 'You are so beautiful,' her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders. 'You are so full of shit,' Lila snarled, but as a contraction settled over her like a net, she bore down and pushed.

I used to pretend that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one.

Is it really worth dying for the person you love?

God, don't they teach you how to spell these days? No, I answer. They teach us to use spell-check.

Stars are fires that burn for thousands of years. Some of them burn slow and long, like red dwarfs. Others-blue giants-burn their due so fast they shine across great distances, and are easy to see. As they Starr to run out of fuel,they burn helium, grow even hotter, and explode in a supernova. Supernovas, they're brighter than the brightest galaxies. They die, but everyone watches them go.

is it like this every night, while we're asleep?

The reason it's important to believe in something, he said, is because you can.

How do you do it? Do what? All of it. You know. Go to class and practice. Make it through the day. Act like ... like none if it mattered. Jason swore beneath his breath and pulled the car over. Then he reached across the seat and brushed his thumb over her cheek; until then, she hadn't been aware she was crying. Trix, he sighed, it mattered.

She believed that unadulterated devotion had its share of protective power, as if love were a steel grinder that Fates could not snip through. She also believed that the moment you relaxed your guard, the moment you were anything less than ferocious in your keeping, that was the moment it could all be snatched away.

Ross was a firm believer that you could not force circumstance. You could buckle your seat belt, but still crash the car. You could throw yourself in front of an oncoming train, but somehow survive. You could wait for years to find a ghost, and then have one sneak up on you when you were too busy falling in love with a woman to pay attention. To that end, he made the conscious decision to stop waiting for Lia. When he least expected her, that was when she would show up.

Not knowing, he said, is a thousand times more horrible than facing your fear.

For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.

The old man was cranky, bitter bastard, but it's the thorn in your side that leaves the biggest hole.

Safety is relative. You can be so close to shore that you can practically feel it under your feet, when you suddenly find yourself breaking apart on the rocks.

Frankly, people don't make sense to me.

I know this much: morality is meant to be a clear line, but it's not really. Things change. Shit happens. Who we are is about not what we do, but why we tell ourselves we do it.

What became of all those lost balloons: they were the loves that slipped out of our fists; the blank eyes that rose in every night sky.

Just so you know: if this ever happens to you, you will not be ready.

Writing is successful schizophrenia because I'm paid to hear voices in my head.

Family's not a thing, it's a place,' Shay said softly. 'It's where all the memories get kept.

True, I'd never met him. And true, he was a fictional character. But he also was what people needed him to be: a dashing hero, and articulate peacemaker, a cunning excape artist.

It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life and think you are seeing yourself clearly. And then one day, you peel off a filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, and you realize you've never truly seen yourself at all. I

Heroes did not always swoop in to rescue. They made questionable calls. They lived with doubts. They replayed and edited and imagined different outcomes. They killed, sometimes, to save.

On one side of the seesaw is my education. My nursing certification. My twenty years of service at the hospital. My neat little home. My spotless RAV4. My National Honor Society-inductee son. All of these building blocks of my existence, and yet the only quality straddling the other side is so hulking and dense that it tips the balance every time: my brown skin.