Quotes from Jodi Picoult

I believe that having something to hope for -- even if it's just a better tomorrow-- is the most powerful drug on this planet.

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

I had become a bridge between the natural world and the human one. I fit into both places and belonged to neither. Half of my heart lived with the wild wolves, the other half lived with my family. In case you cannot do the math: no one can survive with half a heart.

You can't buy a clean conscience.

Things had a way of working out for the best, when you let them run their course.

No matter what you do for someone-no matter if you feed him a bottle as a baby or curl up with him at night to keep him warm or give him food so he's not hungry-make one wrong move at the wrong moment, and you become someone unrecognizable.

Parenthood was like awakening to find a soap bubble in the cup of your palm, and being told you had to carry it while you parachuted from a dizzying height, climbed a mountain range, battled on the front lines. All you wanted to do was tuck it away, safe from natural disasters and violence and prejudice and sarcasm, but that was not an option. You lived in daily fear of watching it burst, of breaking it yourself. Somehow

It's the question mark that comes with death that we can't face, not the period.

The thing that's important to remember about PTSD is that a traumatic event affects different people differently.

Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.

The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve. The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it... some stories just don't have a happy ending

That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

Summertime, I think, is a collective unconscious. We all remember the notes that made up the song of the ice-cream man; we all know what it feels like to brand our thighs on a playground slide that's heated up like a knife in a fire; we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beating across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little longer than the last one, when in fact it's all going the other direction

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate.

Isolation, I think, is the worst thing in the world.

love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow – beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite. And just at this moment, it chose to rear its ugly head.

Death is scary and confusing and painful, and facing it alone shouldn't be the norm.

When you don't have what you want, you have to want what you have.

What I think is that there is no perspective in grief, or in love. How can there be, when one person becomes the center of the universe - either because he has been lost or because he has been found?

This year in school she read Romeo and Juliet, and she told me pragmatically that Romeo was a wimp. He should have just taken Juliet and run away with her, swallowed his pride and worked at some medieval McDonald's. What about the poetry, I asked her. What about the tragedy? And Rebecca told me that that's all very well and good but it isn't the way things happen in real life.

It's a world of permanence

I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. —Vladimir Nabokov

Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help? I