Quotes by Jodi Picoult

[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.”“Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events.“So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.” “Huh?” I say.

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

If you want to know someones story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. Its new, even to me.

If you end your story, its a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you dont, it belongs to anyones imagination. It stays alive forever.

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, youll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someones arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.

And just like that, something inside shifted very subtly, so that all the empty spaces in him suddenly disappeared, so that his breath timed to hers, so that his blood sang. This is why there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that just didn’t have words big enough to describe them.

You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.

I told Seven the Bartender that true love is felonious.Not if theyre over eighteen, he said, shutting the till of the cash register.By then the bar itself had become an appendage, a second torso holding up my first. You take someones breath away, I stressed. You rob them of the ability to utter a single word. I tipped the neck of the empty liquor bottle toward him. You steal a heart.He wiped up in front of me with a dishrag. Any judge would toss that case out on its ass.Youd be surprised.Seven spread the rag out on the brass bar to dry. Sounds like a misdemeanor, if you ask me.I rested my cheek on the cool, damp wood. No way, I said. Once youre in, its for life.

Is it really worth dying for the person you lo

What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.

There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull theres no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion - that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, its too late.

His grandmother had taught him that there was no such thing as coincidence. There are millions of people in this world, she had told him, and the spirits will see that most of them, you never have to meet. But there are one or two that you are tied to, and spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right.

Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas--a whole grammar made of light, for words to hard to speak.

The constellation shes named after tells the story of a princess, who was shackled to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster--punishment for her mother Casseopeia, who had bragged to Poseidon about her own beauty. Perseus, flying by, fell in love with Andromeda and saved her. In the sky, shes pictured with her arms outstretched and her hands chained.

Stars are fires that burn for thousands of years. Some of them burn slow and long, like red dwarfs. Others-blue giants-burn their due so fast they shine across great distances, and are easy to see. As they Starr to run out of fuel,they burn helium, grow even hotter, and explode in a supernova. Supernovas, theyre brighter than the brightest galaxies. They die, but everyone watches them go.

Stars are fires that burn for thousands of years. Some of them burn slow and long, like red dwarfs. Others-blue giants-burn their fuel so fast they shine across great distances, and are easy to see. As they start to run out of fuel, they burn helium, grow even hotter, and explode in a supernova. Supernovas, theyre brighter than the brightest galaxies. They die, but everyone watches them go.

The new father finally hangs up the phone, laughing at absolutely nothing. Congratulations, I say, when what I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in stars so that she never, ever does to him what I have done to my parents.

This is where I go, when I go:Its a room with no windows and no doors, and walls that are thin enough for me to see and hear everything but too thick to break through.Im there, but Im not there.I am pounding to be let out, but nobody can hear me. This is where I go, when I go: To a country where everyones face looks different from mine, and the language is the act of not speaking, and noise is everywhere in the air we breathe. I am doing what the Romans do in Rome; I am trying to communicate, but no one has bothered to tell me that these people cannot hear.This is where I go, when I go:Somewhere completely, unutterably orange.This is where I go, when I go:To the place where my body becomes a piano full of black keys only—the sharps and the flats, when everyone know that to play a song other people want to hear, you need some white keys.This is why I come back:To find those white keys.

God, dont they teach you how to spell these days?No, I answer. They teach us to use spell-check.

Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed