Quotes by Jodi Picoult

true love is felonious… You take someone’s breath away… You rob them of the ability to utter a single word… You steal a heart.

I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.

You? I start to laugh. Look at you. Youre a knock-out. Youre smarter than I am. Youre on a career track and youre family-centered and you probably even can balance your checkbook.And Im lonely, Cambell. Jewel adds. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has its own zipcode. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when Ive got PSM. You dont love someone because theyre perfect, she says. You love them in spite of the fact that theyre not.

But sometimes, in order to win, you have to make sacrifices.

You may think theres nothing very interesting about seeing someone sleep, but that probably means youve never found the girl of your dreams.

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.

A long time ago someone told me that a story will tell itself, when its ready.

True confession: The reason we dont talk about race is because we do not speak a common language.

Do you ever wonder how we all got here? On Earth, I mean. Forget the song and dance about Adam and Eve, which I know is a load of crap. My father likes the myth of the Pawnee Indians, who say that the star deities populated the world: Evening Star and Morning Star hooked up and gave birth to the first female. The first boy came from the Sun and the Moon. Humans rode in on the back of a tornado.Mr. Hume, my science teacher, taught us about this primordial soup full of natural gases and muddy slop and carbon matter that somehow solidified into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates... which sound a lot more like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my opinion. But even once you get there, its a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person.The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe, it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.More amazing is how even though thats become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.

My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.

It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.

As she turns her head and focuses on me, I lift her palm to my mouth, press a kiss in its center. You are so brave, I tell her, and then I smile. When I grow up, I want to be just like you.To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. No Mommy, she says. Youd be sick.

Its about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.

Everyone thinks you make mistakes when youre young. But I dont think we make any fewer when were grown up

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, Ive decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.

I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up- as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasnt it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one thats holding a boys; wasnt it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion- never quite as solid or strong as we think it is. You would assume that, given everything, I saw this coming. But watching Kate watch this boy, I see I have a thousand things to learn.

I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up—as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasnt it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one thats holding a boys; wasnt it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion—never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.

At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone elses thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you became as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked this too shall pass - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something that everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgettingone how painful it had been at the time.

but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she’s stopped believing the impossible can happen?