Quotes from Jodi Picoult

Only cheats go back on a promise.

I wondered what it would be like to not give a damn about what people thought of you.

the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right.

Daddy, you would say, look at my braids. Look at the worst bug bite ever. Look at my handstand, my eggroll dive, my finger painting. Look at my splinter, my spelling list, my somersault, the toad I found. Look at the present I made you, the grade I got, the acceptance letter. Look at the diploma, the ultrasound, your granddaughter. I couldn't possibly remember all the things you've asked me to look at. I just remember that you asked.

There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else.

There are pictures of me, too, but not many. I go from infant to about ten years old in one fell swoop. Maybe it's because I was the third child, and they were sick and tired of keeping a catalog of life. Maybe it's because they forgot. It's nobody's fault, and it's not a big deal, but it's a little depressing all the same. A photo says, You were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, You were so important to me that i put down everything else to come watch.

You will ask yourself How come; you will ask yourself What if.

I pulled word after word from my core, like silk for a spider's web, spinning a make-believe life. That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?" - Minka (The Storyteller)

you need to think about the difference between what is secret and what is private.

When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies. Like: The fifth time's the charms. Like: Things between Zoe and me will be better once the baby's born. Like: One sip isn't going to kill me.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it really fall? If a character sits in a book and no one reads it, is he truly alive? As

Have you ever really held the hand of someone you love? Not just in passing, a loose link between you—but truly clasped, with the pulses of your wrists beating together and your fingers mapping the knuckles and nails like s cartographer learning a country by heart?

Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky, it bled color?

Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting.

It was possible, Trixie supposed, that everyone had two faces: Some of us did a better job of hiding it than others.

It was simply what happened when the histories of two people dovetailed into one.

A villain let your creativity out of its cage.

The brain can do a lot of things, Olive said, but it can't distinguish between what's really happening and what you're imagining. That's why scary movies scare you and why you cry at Nicholas Sparks books.

The catch was this: Power always involved loss of humanity.

May be it took realizing that you could die to keep you from wanting to do it.

I don't believe in self-pity. I think it's for people who have too much time on their hands. Instead of dreaming of a miracle, you learn to make your own.

How are you going to know who I am, she finally said, if I dont look like me?

Hope was a pathological part of puberty, like acne and surging hormones. You might sound cynical to the world, but that was just a defense mechanism, cover up coating a zit, because it was too embarrassing to admit that in spite of the bum deals you kept getting you hadn't completely given up.