Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Some people spend their whole lives looking for that one person. I was lucky enough to have her all along.

It takes a dozen bees to gather enough nectar to make a teaspoon of honey, each of them alighting on roughly 2,600 flowers and flying 850 miles back and forth. A worker bee weighs little more than a breath—around 100 milligrams—but she can carry half her body weight in nectar.

It is probably the hardest thing to understand: how even horror can become commonplace. . . You could stop expecting the most awful thing to happen, because it already had.

There are skeletons in everyone's closet, things no one ever wants the world to discover.

He thought of the grammar of Gaelic, in which you did not say you were in love withsomeone, but that you "had love toward" her, as if itwere a physical thing you could present and hold—a bundle of tulips, a golden ring, a parcel of tenderness.

In our world, Darija said, throwing aside the chapter she was marking up, there will be no semicolons.

Tutoring a four year old to get into an exclusive preschool made as much sense as hiring a swim coach for a guppy.

Inside was my father's wallet, his reading glasses, his wedding ring. Identity, insight, heart: the only things we leave behind.

And in general, the residents of the town wondered why they all felt hollow just beneath the throat, the result of missing something they had never been able to name in the first place.

Until then she hadn't considered that there was a trade off, that she might not fit anymore in places where she'd been comfortable.

transgender?" "I like to think about it in terms of handedness," Dr. Powers explains. "If I asked you to sign your name with your nondominant hand, it would feel weird. If I asked you to describe it to me, you'd probably say things like the pen doesn't fit comfortably in my hand; or it's awkward; or I have to try hard to make legible something that I can do with my other hand effortlessly. It feels forced.

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

The Native Americans know that wolves are mirrors for humans. What they show us are our strengths and weaknesses... When I lived with the wolves, I was proud of the reflection of myself. But when I came back, I always paled in comparison.

There's really no such thing as a right or wrong choice. We don't make decisions. Our decisions make us.

Don't say it. Don't say nobody's going to stare at me, because they will. Don't tell me it doesn't matter because it does. And don't tell me I look fine because that's a lie. I'm a freak, Mom. Look at me.

I might never be a cover girl, but I was a girl who could cover it all.

When you have a child, you will do anything for her. You may not do it well, but you will kill yourself trying. You will trip over obstacles as you clear them out of her path. You will give her the choices you didn't have.

Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

Being a mother gives you a singular sort of vision, a prism through which you can see your child with many different faces all at once. It is the reason you can watch him shatter a ceramic lamp, and still remember him as an angel.

I pick up a pen and start to unscrew the whole thing, pull out the skinny little tube of blue ink. It would be so cool to have one of these built inside you, like a squid; you could point your finger and leave your mark on anything you wanted.

In the wild, a calf under the age of two will not survive without its mother. In the wild, a mother's job is to teach her daughter everything she will need to know to become a mother herself. In the wild, a mother and daughter stay together until one of them dies.

We had been naive enough to believe that we were invincible; that we could run blind through the hairpin turns of life at treacherous speeds and never crash.

Here's what girlfriends do for you: they provide the reality check. They are the ones who tell you when you have spinach between your teeth or when your ass looks fat in a pair of jeans or when you're being a bitch. They tell you, and there's no drama or agenda, like there would be if the message had come from your husband. They tell you the truth because you need to hear it, but it doesn't alter the bond between you.

The highest ranking wolf in the pack isn't the one that uses brute force. It's the one who can, and chooses not to.