Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Her voice sounded like a string that was fraying.

It does not matter who forgives you, if you're the one who can't forget.

You can love a pet more than you love some people. [...] It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there.

All I'm saying is that the past is nothing but a springboard for the future.

In both relationships, there were only two people: one who gave and one who sacrificed

Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details. It couldn't save a single child-not the ones who'd gone to Sterling High that day, expecting the normal; not Josie Cormier; certainly not Peter. So what was the recipe? Was it love, mixed with something else for good measure? Luck? Hope? Forgiveness?

A trial was a stupid word, considering that an attempt was never good enough: you were supposed to toe the line, period.

When the truth came out, and no one wanted to be around her anymore, it stood to reason Josie wouldn't want to be around herself either.

There is always a winner, and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.

The best lies are the ones that are wrapped around a core of truth.

The constellation she's named after tells the story of a princess, who was shackled to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster--punishment for her mother Casseopeia, who had bragged to Poseidon about her own beauty. Perseus, flying by, fell in love with Andromeda and saved her. In the sky, she's pictured with her arms outstretched and her hands chained.

Okay, but what if death wasn't the ending you've been told it is? What if time is like fabric, a bolt that's so long you can't see where it starts or it ends?" She pauses. "Maybe at the moment a person dies, that life gets compressed so small and dense it's like a pinprick in the cloth. It may be that at that point, you enter a new reality. A new stitch in time, basically.

But he was giving her back her heart, so that when he left her life, there would be no strings attached.

You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

What we could not see clearly, we didn't have to pretend to understand.

Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with the word prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color. It's also about who has institutional power. Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that make success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that make success easier to achieve. It's hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them. And that, I realized, was why I had to write this book.

The whole panorama makes me realize how small I am, in the grand scheme of things. How insignificant my problems are when you zoom out and out and out and see the whole of the world.

Never ask your child a open-ended question, such as Do you want to go to bed now? You won't want to hear the answer, believe me. Do you want me to carry you upstairs, or do you want to walk upstairs to go to bed? That way, you get the outcome you want and they feel empowered.

Sometimes you have to have the perspective of distance. And sometimes, you cannot tell what you're looking at until it's right under your eye.

one half leaning in, one half pulling away.

And that's what I think love is...when your hindsight's twenty-twenty, and you still wouldn't change a thing.

Who we are is about not what we do, but why we tell ourselves we do it.

Science is less messy than emotion

Sometimes you can't tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence