Quotes from Jodi Picoult

I've thought a lot about it: how you can ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom. I've thought about all the things I could have done differently, and if it would have led to another outcome. But thinking doesn't change anything, does it?

It turns out that the more you repeat the same action, no matter how reprehensible, the more you can make an excuse for it in your own mind.

The truth is, sometimes things don't happen to you for a reason. Sometimes it's just about being in the right place at the right time for someone else.

you cannot take something i trust you with and use it against me -- plain truth

How come people don't do things like that nowadays? You grope around in the back of a sedan in high school and you think you're in love. Nobody gets swept off their feet anymore.

How incredibly easy it is to hide behind white skin, I think, looking at these probable supremacists. The benefit of the doubt is in your favor. You're not suspicious.

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD

I got precious little time for you to belong to me. I'm gonna make sure it isn't any shorter than it has to be.

Whether or not you believed a fetus was a human being, there was no question in anyone's mind that a grown woman was one. Even if you placed moral value on that fetus, you couldn't give it rights unless they were stripped away from the woman carrying it. Perhaps the question wasn't When does a fetus become a person? but When does a woman stop being one?

Whatever we forfeit echoes the pain from all the other times we have been disappointed in our lives.

The Bible promises a land of milk and honey. The Koran says paradise has rivers of honey for those who guard against evil. Krishna, the Hindu deity, is often shown with a blue bee on his forehead. The bee itself is considered a symbol of Christ: the sting of justice and the mercy of honey, side by side.

Stars are fires that burn for thousands of years. Some of them burn slow and long, like red dwarfs. Others-blue giants-burn their fuel so fast they shine across great distances, and are easy to see. As they start to run out of fuel, they burn helium, grow even hotter, and explode in a supernova. Supernovas, they're brighter than the brightest galaxies. They die, but everyone watches them go.

maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.

Do you think there will ever be a time when racism doesn't exist? No, because that means white people would have to buy into being equal. Who'd choose to dismantle the system that makes them special

May be the question we need to ask isn't whether there's any fresh twenty first century sin...but whether the people who define sin have changed, because of the times.

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.

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.

We were gasoline poured onto fire. With you I burned twice as high and hot. This is why you and I could never have stayed together. We would have consumed each other until there was nothing left.

what makes a family a family isn't doing everything right all the time but, instead, giving a second chance to the people you love who do things wrong.

I felt this boy whose name I couldn't be bothered to remember grunting and heaving inside me; I was that empty and that far away. And suddenly I knew what became of all those lost balloons: they were the loves that slipped out of our fists; the blank eyes that rose in every night sky.

The strange thing; her face, after she hit me. She was in greater pain than I. You could see it in her eyes - like she had been violated in some way that broke her own image.

In the darkest crease of the night, I would love you until the moon lost its footing in the sky.

Once you are close enough to see it coming, there's nothing to do but weather the storm.

My mother nods toward Violet and her little friend, sprinkling grass over their mud pies. "This has been going on so much longer than either of us, Kennedy. From where you stepped in, in your life, it looks like we've got miles to go. But me?" She smiles in the direction of the girls. "I look at that, and I guess I'm amazed at how far we've come." —