Quotes by Jodi Picoult

I used to sit in front of my fathers Jag, watching the raindrops run their kamikaze suicide missions from one edge of the windshield to the wiper blade.

I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my fathers waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.

Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didnt even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

Sometimes knowing whats right isnt a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all.

It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t.

When we sat down on the couch again, you curled up against my side, like you used to when you were a tod

I drew it over my skin like a violins bow, No one would ever hear the song of my shame.

she didnt need anyone. At Wheeler, even when she stood out with her pink hair and quilter army-surplus jacket and combat bots, she did this without apology. It was a great irony that the very fact of a relationship with her would diminish her appeal, that the moment she came to love me back and depend on me as much as I depended on her, she would no longer be a truly independent spirit. No way in hell was I going to be the one to take that quality away from her.

We all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn’t have any.

The only thing theyll let you shoot with a camera.

Thats the crazy thing about lies. You start to fall for them, yourself.

You can miss a person youve never known.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were?

The hardest part about being back in the human world was relearning emotion. Everything a wolf does has a practical, simple reason. There is no cold shoulder, no saying one thing when you mean something else, no innuendo. Wolves fight for two reasons: family and territory. Humans are driven by ego; wolves have no room for it and will literally nip it out of you. For a wolf, the world is about understanding, knowledge, respect – attributes that many humans have cast off, along with an appreciation of the natural world.

You cant look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

...when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see.

It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

You have to understand – there is a romance to Africa. You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the hand of God. You watch the slow lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heat, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world.

When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, youhave plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all the nerves are still a little raw.