Quotes by Jodi Picoult

Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.

I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, Id hurt Rob. Maybe thats what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late weve wounded the people were trying to protect.

It still hurts, she whispered. Even when youre doing it for someone else, that doesnt stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.

Theres a problem with wounded birds, Cassie, Connor said. Either they fly away from you one day, or else they never get better. They stay hurt no matter what you do.

It turned out people truly did cry into their coffee cups.

Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell hed promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again.

There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.

The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it ... some stories just dont have a happy ending.

You will ask me, after this, why, I didnt tell you this before. It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable to write yourself free.

For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.

Things dont always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find youre looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close proximity. Theres an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.Make of it what you will.

The Native Americans know that wolves are mirrors for humans. What they show us are our strengths and weaknesses... When I lived with the wolves, I was proud of the reflection of myself. But when I came back, I always paled in comparison.

Home is not a place, but rather, the people who love you.

At that moment, Oliver realized that home is not a place, but rather, the people who love you.

You know how sometimes, your life is so perfect you’re afraid for the next moment, because it couldn’t possibly be quite as good? That’s what it felt like.

I think we deserve a happily-ever-after.If anyone ever did, its us.

Heres my question: What age are you when youre in Heaven? I mean, if its Heaven, you should be at your beauty-queen best, and I doubt that all the people who die of old age are wandering around toothless and bald. It opens up a whole additional realm of questions, too. If you hang yourself, do you walk around all gross and blue, with your tongue spitting out of your mouth? If you are killed in a war, do you spend eternity minus the leg that got blown up by a mine?I figure that maybe you get a choice. You fill out the application form that asks you if you want a star view or a cloud view, if you like chicken or fish or manna for dinner, what age youd like to be seen as by everyone else. Like me, for example, I might pick seventeen, in the hopes I grow boobs by then, and even if Im a pruny centegenarian by the time I die, in Heaven, Id be young and pretty.Once at a dinner party I heard my father say that even though he was old old old, in his heart he was twenty-one. So maybe there is a place in your life you ear out like a rut, or even better, like the soft spot on the couch. And no matter what else happens to you, you come back to that.The problem, I suppose, is that everyones different. What happens in Heaven when all these people are trying to find each other after so many years spent apart? Say that you die and start looking around for your husband, who died five years ago. what if youre picturing him at seventy, but he hit his groove at sixteen and is wandering around suave as can be?Or what if youre Kate, and you die at sixteen, but in Heaven you choose to look thirty-five, an age you never got to be here on Earth. How would anyone ever be able to find you?

In the space between yes and no, theres a lifetime. Its the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; its the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies youll tell yourself in the future.

‎Pick ten strangers and stick them in a room, and ask them which of us they feel sorrier for - you or me - and we all know who theyll choose.

So you know what mean when I say that I dont think anyone who falls in love has a choice. Youre just pulled to that person like true north, whether its good for you or bound to break your heart.