Quotes from Jodi Picoult

There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.

Having to face him at a competency hearing is like getting to hell and finding out that the only food available is raw liver-insult added to injury.

courage wasn't something you were bequeathed at birth, and it wasn't a lack of fright. It was overcoming your fear, because the ones you love mattered more.

I know these ghosts. I know what it's like to move around in the world, but not really be a part of it. And I know what it's like to have people stare right through you, and not believe what they are seeing. If I exist, why can't they?

One of the first things Adam told me was that I was pretty, which should have been my first clue that he was a liar.

It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don't like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn't speak that language. They didn't learn it as children and they didn't manage to pick it up as adults, either.

It is such a heady rush to be the object of someone's attention in a good way, not as a freak, that I keep forgetting to hide.

What if the characters in a book had lives of their own after the cover was closed?

We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it.

You could have been Bethany Matthews, Delia Hopkins, Cleopatra - it wouldn't matter. And if you'd grown up with a thousand lemon trees in the middle of the desert, with a cactus instead of a Christmas tree and a pet armadillo, well then, I would have gone to law school at Arizona State, I guess. I would have defended illegal aliens crossing the border. But we still would have wound up together, Dee. No matter what kind of life I had, you'd be at the end of it.

I'd make a snide comment about the youths of america but I'm too impressed by the fact that she's reading something other than Fifty Shades of Grey.

He] has always been my anchor. The problem is that anchors don't just keep you from floating away. Sometimes, they drag you down.

You don't make peace only with God. You make it with people. Sin isn't global. It's personal. If you do wrong to someone, the only way to fix that is to go to that same person and do right by him.

What he did was wrong. He doesn't deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it's choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you

the quiet break of soul that comes when you realize that what looked like a rainbow was actually only a trick of the light.

A level of a house, his father has told him, is called a story. Nathaniel likes that. It makes him feel like maybe he is living between the covers of a book himself. Like maybe everyone in every home is sure to get a happy ending.

There are a lot of places, I reply, that I thought I'd never go.

When I kept someone else from getting hurt, did I hurt you?

Lacy took the box she'd brought up from the basement and placed each item inside. Here was the crime scene: look at what was left behind and try to re-create the boy.

When you love someone, you'll do anything you can to keep them with you.

Louie's final thought before he passed out was that this was indeed some crazy world, where the waiting period to get an abortion was longer than the waiting period to get a gun.

I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow in it. what happen then? what else, I said It broke.

Jesse just smiles. He blows a smoke ring. Sis, he says, welcome to the Dark Side.

Kate had the shape of a pixie, all noodle arms and legs; and when she bent to the ground and kicked up her feet, it looked as delicate as a spider walking a wall. Me, I sort of defied gravity with a thud.