Quotes from Jodi Picoult

I close my eyes, rub my thumb against the bridge of my nose to ward off the headache. Well, Rome wasn't built in a day.

all the wonderful things happen when we are not aware of them?

I don't really understand this. When you have so many people, each one inevitably fascinating, why would you limit yourself to only those like you?

maybe you believe that we fall into our future blindly, drifting from adventure to adventure, our journey zigzagging not according to plan but according to pure chance. Or just maybe, as random and haphazard as our lives seems--maybe that's exactly what the author had in mind.

You don't borrow trouble.

Why bring up something that hurts so much, if it's not going to change anything?

We [the Amish] look alike. We pray alike. We live alike. ...But none of these things mean we all think alike.

To find out a heart she'd believed irrevocably broken had somewhere along the way been fixed.

There are so many ways to betray someone. You can whisper behind his back. You can deceive him on purpose. You can deliver him into the hands of his enemy, when he trusts you. You can break a promise. The question is, if you do any of these things, are you also betraying yourself?

The only monsters I have ever known were men," I said.

Because you make me believe there are things worth fighting for.

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

There are building blocks of love and the very bottom layer is comfort. (from Vanishing Acts)

Every life has a beginning, a middle, and an end; dissect history and you'll see the word that defines it as a tale, a narrative.

Every beginning is already the start of the end

The problem, he said, with being one of the best is that you still have to get better. But you're competing with yourself.

With each word that passes my lips, I feel less heavy. It is as if I am giving him sentences made of stones, and the more I relay, the more of the burden he is carrying.

It was that she truly believed you could be fourteen when you learned how love could change the speed your blood ran through you, how it made you dream in kaleidoscope color. It was that Trixie knew she couldn't have loved Jason this hard if he hadn't loved her that way too.

Every holocaust starts with an ember. You just have to know what to look for.

I think half the battle is figuring out what works for you

I want to finish what I started." Life asked death, "Why do people love me but hate you?" Death responded, "Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth." —Unknown

My father died last year," Thomas said. "I still look for him in crowds.

I know it feels crass to talk about death in such mercenary terms, but that's the very problem with death in the first place. We don't know how to talk about it. We use euphemisms and discuss pearly gates and angels while glossing over the fact that we have to die to get there. We treat it like a mystery, when in fact, it's the one experience all of us are guaranteed to share.

Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on. Ironically