Quotes by Jodi Picoult

Change isnt 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.

Change isnt 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.

Sara, I ask finally, what do you want from me?I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like, she says thickly. I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back.But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky.To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character.

And just because you turn out differently than everyones imagined you would doesnt mean that youve failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most poplar girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead.

Every baby is born beautiful. Its what we project on them that makes them ugly.

Memories arent stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

Taking a deep breath, I shake my head and find Judge staring at me. Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans, I say. Once you leave the litter, you sever contact with your mothers.

History isnt about dates and places and wars. Its about the people who fill the spaces between them.

I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.

Scars are just a treasure map for pain youve buried too deep to remember.

You didnt get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.

There are kinds of pain that you cant speak out loud.

Just because you cant see the wound doesnt mean it isnt hurting.

She sobbed the way she did everything else- with passion and excess.

Its never fifty-fifty in a marriage. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works hard to keep things rolling smoothly, someone else sails along for the ride. Someone who would do anything to keep it the way it was in the beginning.

When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that youve worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point taht wasnt there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isnt new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.

When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you dont just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it cant be destroyed, just channeled into something else.

It was a strange thing, to still be in love with your wife and to not know if you liked her. What would happen when this was all over? Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help?I had filed for divorce, but that wasnt what I really wanted. What I really wanted was for all of us to go back two years, and start over. Had I ever really told her that?

So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent Id forgotten to communicate?