Quotes by Jodi Picoult

I woke up one morning thinking about wolves and realized that wolf packs function as families. Everyone has a role, and if you act within the parameters of your role, the whole pack succeeds, and when that falls apart, so does the pack.

I feel Im able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis, then I wont have to live through it, I guess.

Its certainly my honor to be able to, hopefully, change the world a tiny bit, one mind at a time.

“There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That its okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.”

“The truth doesnt always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies”

“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”

“Just because its fiction doesnt mean its any less true.”

“If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.”

“But love wasnt about sacrifice, and it wasnt about falling short of someones expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone elses life would not have been as rich without us here.”

“When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.”

“Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasnt noticed--werent sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were Im sorry.”

“I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.”

“What would you do if you only had one day left in this world? Spend it with the people you love? Travel to the far corners of the earth to see as many wonders as possible? Eat nothing but chocolate? Would you apologize for all your mistakes? Would you stand up to those youd never had the courage to face? Would you tell your secret crush that you loved him or her? Why is it that we wait till the last minute to do the things we should be doing all along?”

“Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.”

“It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.”

“A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead.”

“But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.”

“When you think youre right, youre most likely wrong.”

“When it rains, her father said it pours.”

“Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.”