Quotes from Jodi Picoult

A heart with so many stress fractures would never be anything but broken.

So don't judge me, unless you've fallen asleep on a couch with your ill child, thinking this night might be her last. Ask instead: would you do it? Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy's dying wish?

Security was a mirage; being tied down hardly counted when the other end of the rope had unraveled.

I can't answer a single one of these, which is how I know that whether I'm ready or not, I'm growing up.

I didn't want to invade his privacy; I didn't want to fight with him; I didn't want anyone else to ever hurt him. I just wanted him to be a child forever." She glanced up, crying harder now. "But you can't do that, if you're a parent. Because part of your job is letting them grow up.

When you love someone, there's a pattern to the way you come together. You might not even realize it, but your bodies are choreographed: a touch on the hip, a stroke of the hair. A staccato kiss, break away, a longer one. It's a routine, but not in the boring sense of the word. It's just the way you've learned to fit.

True love is like bread. It needs the right ingredients, a little heat, and some magic to rise.

let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: it solidfies into something wlaw. not grief, like you'd expect, or even regret. no, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn't until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tounge that you realize this is angel in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measyred and spread.

Sometimes the key to happiness is just expecting a little bit less. That way, you'll never be dissappointed.

Just so you know, I begin, when they say 'Once upon a time'... they're lying. It's not once upon a time. It's not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

Lacy truly believed that when you asked a patient How do you feel?, what was wrong wasn't nearly as important as what was right.

oh shit, i think. my cheeks are on fire; my heart starts to pound.

A bus cuts the world in half...

She had tried to hide the discomfort behind the mask of competence that she usually wore, only to realize that in her hurry, she must have left it behind somewhere.

I lean against my sister's shoulder. I thought lightning wasn't supposed to strike in the same place twice. Sure it does, Izzy tells me. But only if you're too dumb to move.

She is the person I ran to when I got my period; the one who helped me knit back together my first broken heart; the hand I would reach for in the middle of the night when I could no longer remember which side our father parted his hair on, or what it sounded like when our mother laughed. No matter what she is now, before all that, she was my built-in best friend.

That's a little unrealistic, don't you think? So was the Final Solution, but it got pretty far, Leo points out.

You told me this lawsuit isn't about race. But that's what started it. And it doesn't matter if you can convince the jury I'm the reincarnation of Florence Nightingale—you can't take away the fact that I am Black. The truth is, if I looked like you, this would not be happening to me.

What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together? Bread, of course.

Like Connor, Alex protected me -and he was the only person I let close enough to do it. Like Connor, Alex could finish my sentences before I did. But unlike Connor, for whom I had ultimately come too late, I was just in time to take care of Alex.

I sigh. "But if you'd talked to Jules—if she could hear you . . ." My voice trails off. "Then you wouldn't feel quite so crazy?" Oliver asks gently. "Can't you believe in me, if I believe in you?

You have a choice. You can just go on the facts and form your own opinions. Or you can hold the truth in your hands, and see it for the gift it is.

Frankly, people don't make sense to me.' I nod in agreement. 'Frankly, people don't make sense to me either,' I say.

Eli had learned long ago that you can stare right at something and not see what lies beneath the surface.