Quotes from Jodi Picoult

I don't know why, when it comes to death, we say we lost someone. They're not missing or misplaced. They're whisked away from the tightest embrace.

Because we're two of a kind. You were made to take care of me, and I'm going to take care of you.

Build your scaffolding again, but while you're conscious. Use the bricks that you've still got, in spite of the pandemic. Make coffee in the morning. Meditate. Watch Schitt's Creek. Have a glass of wine at dinner. FaceTime the friends you can't see in person. Whatever habits you used to have, stack them up and give yourself structure. I promise. You won't feel as unsettled.

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound and more like a poultice.

Oliver, she says. You can do this. I watch her walk away. When Delilah talks like that, it's easy to remember why I gave up everything I knew in order to be with her. She believes in me, and if someone believes in you wholeheartedly, you start to believe in yourself as well.

Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and may be never really had.

what's morally right is considered wrong...and what's morally wrong, you can get away with.

Nobody's all good or all bad. They just get painted that way.

I couldn't hear his voice over the hammer of my heart. And I told myself over and over I should have known that someone who could love so hard and so well could also hate, and hurt, as deeply.

People are never who you think they are, that it was necessary to get a complete background check on a person before you made any promises.

Neither of us, it turns out, has been the only one who lost someone she loved.

You know, if you monitored the humidity a little better in here, you might reduce the irritants.' 'I assume you're referring to the mites, and not the lawyers.

There was a time when I prayed to saints. What I liked about them were their humble beginnings: they were human, once, and so you knew that they just got it in a way Jesus never would. They understood what it meant to have your hopes dashed or your promises broken or you feelings hurt.

In the past, even Alex's promises hadn't prevented a reoccurence. She didn't have a choice. She wished he could see that as clearly as she did.

Outside, the moon is a silver sliver. Every night, the shadow eats a slice of it, until it's nothing but this hollow rind. I feel the same way; with each day, I lose a little more of myself.

Vonita, God rest her soul, used to say that if men were the ones to get pregnant, abortion would probably be a sacrament. The Super Bowl halftime show would celebrate it. Men who had terminated pregnancies would be asked to stand and be applauded at church for the courage to make that decision. Viagra would be sold with a coupon for three free abortions.

Being scared just meant you had something worth coming back to.

I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive—the sum of the parts equals more than the whole.

What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind - a trail made of stripped off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia - and who hands back each of these when its needed?

The only thing they'll let you shoot with a camera.

When I run across something so incredible that I want to show it to someone else. The problem is, when you make the choice to be a loner, you lose that privilege.

Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

My father died last year," Thomas said. "I still look for him in crowds." "I'm sorry." He shrugged. "I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room—but eventually, you learn to live with it.

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. Or hold him as he cries, but imagine his smile. Or watch him walk toward you, the size of a man, and see the dimpled skin of an infant.