Quotes by Jodi Picoult

“Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.”

“Someone real, I hear myself saying. Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone whos smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a symphony and start to cry, because he understands music can be too big for words. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone I want to talk to first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Someone I feel like Ive known my whole life, even if I havent.”

“I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.”

“Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didnt get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.”

“People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But thats not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.”

“I love you, he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.”

“I dont think we get a choice in who we fall for, Ian whispers. I think we just do.”

“Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday.”

“How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?”

“Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while its there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.”

“If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?”

“I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.”

“The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.”

“Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.”

“So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.”

“I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.”

“He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesnt follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable”

“You dont love someone because theyre perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that theyre not.”

“Heres a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, wed rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman whos soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesnt feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we cant wait to come back to.”

“A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.”