Quotes from Jodi Picoult

It is very hard to believe you when I'm trying so hard to pretend it never happened.

They sat in the companionable awkwardness caused by knowing extremely private things about each other that had never been directly confided.

How do you undo intimacy? How do you go back to being acquaintances, when the other person knows every inch and groove of you, every irrational fear, every trigger?

You say I love you, but it's no longer like throwing open the windows of your heart. You say it the way you'd say It's Tuesday or I'm a brunette: matter-of-fact, a truth, a statement. Not an exaltation. Not a miracle. You wonder when the core of love changed from passion to compassion.

For the risk of it, for the sheer surprise of pressing one's nose to the glass and finding someone staring back on the other side.

I'm sorry, I sobbed. I'm helpless. That's where you're wrong, she told me. You're mot helpless. You need help. There's a big difference.

Could you hate your son for what he had done, and still love him for who he had been? The

in order to forgive, you have to remember how you were hurt in the first place. And that in order to forget, you had to accept your role in what had happened.

The problem is that anchors don't just keep you from floating away. Sometimes, they drag you down.

Is Understatement 101 a course in medical school? Of course. It's the prereq for Lying Through One's Teeth.

It reminded Lacy of running into someone you hadn't seen for a while, and finding her bald and missing her eyebrows: you knew she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but pretended you didn't, because it was easier that way for both of you.

Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

Well, I had the other problem, I told him. I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in. What happened then? What else, I said. It broke.

No child really chooses his religion; it is just the luck of the draw which blanket of beliefs you are wrapped in.

It was the sort of place where you could hear the tumblers of your mind falling into place as you pieced thought together, as you tried to match it to action.

Tears have a whole different melody, didn't they? without the pain threaded through them?_______ nineteen minutes .

If, even after you make what everyone considers to be the biggest mistake of your life, you stop thinking it's a mistake and may be see it as the best thing that ever could have happened.

The only way you can tell how far you've come is to know where you started.

If you knew you were going to die, wasn't it better to choose the time and place, instead of waiting for fate to drop on you like an anvil?

I'm the kind of person you want to kill.

His biggest fear was that if and when he did find his missing daughter, she would no longer recognize who he had become in order to save her.

If she was getting anywhere on this journey, it was still the wrong way.

you even put into words the confession that you made a mistake, that you want to turn back time and try again? How do you say it without hurting the people who have been sitting across from you at the breakfast table for fifteen years, who know your Starbucks order and which side of the bed to leave you at a hotel?

When we were little, Eric and Fitz and I invented a language. I've forgotten most of it, with the exception of a few words: valyango, which meant pirate; palapala, which meant rain; and ruskifer, which had no translation to English but described the dimpled bottom of a woven basket, all the reeds coming together to form one joint spot, and that we sometimes used to explain our friendship.