Handle With Care Jodi Picoult Quotes

When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.

I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.

It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that, or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.

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

All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.

People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.

That's what happens to dreams, life gets in the way.

Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole.

You know how sometimes, your life is so perfect you’re afraid for the next moment, because it couldn’t possibly be quite as good? That’s what it felt like.

What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.

I think you can love a person too much. You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.

You don't have to say I love you to say I love you," you said with a shrug. "All you have to do is say my name and I know." ..."Can't you hear it?" you said. "When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.

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

Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.

People changed. Even the people you thought you knew as well as you knew yourself.

There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?

You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it's a catch-22: all of those things you're willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you've lost yourself.

When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way.

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.

Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you'd start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number.

Just because you didn't put a name to something did not mean it wasn't there.

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.

I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet.

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.

I know what it's like to start something and have it suddenly grow out of control. And you want to get rid of it, because it's hurting you and everyone else around you, but every time you try to do that, it consumes you again.

Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up.

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?

They're fake bullets, so why do I feel like Im bleeding out?

Just because you had every right to feel sorry for yourself didn't mean you ever took the opportunity to do so.

Even though it hurt, there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.

I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.

You can miss a person you've never known.

Here's 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, we'd rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman who's 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 doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to.

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

there was not much distinction between losing a friend and a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumph, and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside.

But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone's 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 else's life would not have been as rich without us here.

There are kinds of pain that you can't speak out loud.

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.

Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids... but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life.

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

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

A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes...And a good mother is someone whose child wants to follow her.

I think there are two different oceans - the one that plays with you in the summer, and the one that gets so mad in the winter.

A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up.

I shouldn't have eavesdropped, but sometimes, that's the only way to find out the truth.

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who wouldn't let go. We live in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.

By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I'd hurt Rob. Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect.

Parents aren’t the people you come from. They’re the people you want to be, when you grow up.

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.

Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.

Maybe that’s what we do to the people we love: we take shots in the dark and realize too late we’ve wounded the people we are trying to protect.

When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you don't just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can't be destroyed, just channeled into something else.

Once upon a time there were two sisters. One of them was really, really strong, and one of them wasn't.' You looked at me. 'Your turn.' I rolled my eyes. 'The strong sister went outside into the rain and realized the reason she was strong was because she was made out of iron, but it was raining and she rusted. The end.' No, because the sister who wasn't strong went outside into the rain when it was raining, and hugged her really tight until the sun came out again.

Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.

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

Most people who offer their help do it to make themselves feel better, not us. To be honest, I don't blame them. It's superstition: If you give assistance to the family in need... if you throw salt over your shoulder... if you don't step on the cracks, then maybe you'll be immune. Maybe you'll be able to convince yourself that this could never happen to you.

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend.

God doesn't give people burdens they can't handle.

Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was... ...Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up. I sat between my mother and my father, watching strangers on TV carry in Shaker rockers and dusty paintings and ancient beer tankards and cranberry glass dishes; people and their hidden treasures, who had to be told by experts that they'd taken something incredibly precious for granted.

People always want to know what it feels like, so I’ll tell you: there’s a sting when you first slice, and then your heart speeds up when you see the blood, because you know you’ve done something you shouldn’t have, and yet you’ve gotten away with it. Then you sort of go into a trance, because it’s truly dazzling—that bright red line, like a highway route on a map that you want to follow to see where it leads. And—God—the sweet release, that’s the best way I can describe it, kind of like a balloon that’s tied to a little kid’s hand, which somehow breaks free and floats into the sky. You just know that balloon is thinking, Ha, I don’t belong to you after all; and at the same time, Do they have any idea how beautiful the view is from up here? And then the balloon remembers, after the fact, that it has a wicked fear of heights. When reality kicks in, you grab some toilet paper or a paper towel (better than a washcloth, because the stains don’t ever come out 100 percent) and you press hard against the cut. You can feel your embarrassment; it’s a backbeat underneath your pulse. Whatever relief there was a minute ago congeals, like cold gravy, into a fist in the pit of your stomach. You literally make yourself sick, because you promised yourself last time would be the last time, and once again, you’ve let yourself down. So you hide the evidence of your weakness under layers of clothes long enough to cover the cuts, even if it’s summertime and no one is wearing jeans or long sleeves. You throw the bloody tissues into the toilet and watch the water go pink before you flush them into oblivion, and you wish it were really that easy.

Choices are funny things-ask a native tribe that's eaten grubs and roots forever if they're unhappy, and they'll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don't know there's an alternative, you can't miss it.

Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's.

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

[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.

Maybe a mother wasn't what she seemed to be on the surface.

It was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearable sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet.

There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.

Until I understood why you didn't cry, even though it hurt: there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.

I had always been suspicious of women who described the dissolution of their marriages as something that happened overnight. How could you not know? I'd thought. How could you miss all those signs? Well, let me tell you how: you were so busy putting out a fire directly in front of you that you were completely oblivious to the inferno raging at your back.

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.

Or in other words, it's the substance you've got when you start that determines the outcome.

Polar north can't get away from a magnet; the magnet finds it, no matter what.

When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.

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 wasn't noticed--weren't 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 I'm sorry.

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

I would prove to you that being different isn't a death sentence but a call to arms.

It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else's. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party - a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.

Here's what I hadn't realized: the mother you haven't seen for almost thirty-six years isn't your mother, she's a stranger. Sharing DNA doesn't make you fast friends. This wasn't a joyous reunion. It was just awkward.

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

God, what had we done? It didn't really matter. Piper had been the kind of friend with whom I didn't have to fill in the spaces with random conversation. It was okay to just be with her. She knew that sometimes I needed that - to not have to take care of anyone or anything, to simply exist in my own space, adjacent to hers.

I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.

There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.

Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.

Other people look at me and think: That poor woman; she has a child with a disability. But all I see when I look at you is that girl who had memorized all the words to Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by the time she was three, the girl who crawls into bed with me whenever there's a thunderstorm - not because you're afraid but because I am, the girl whose laugh has always vibrated inside my own body like a tuning fork. I would never have wished for an able-bodied child, because that child would have been someone who wasn't you.

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. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn't contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.

But mostly I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet. I still loved him. It felt like anything else permanent that has gone missing; a lost tooth, a severed leg. You might know better, but that doesn’t keep your tongue from poling at the hole in your gum, or your phantom limb from aching.

Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction.

I wonder if there's a difference between being a dutiful mother and being a good mother.' There is,' I said, and Charlotte looked up at me, expectant. Even if I couldn't articulate the difference as an adult, as a child I had felt it. I thought for a moment. 'A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes,' I said. And a good mother?' I lifted my gaze to Charlotte's. 'Is someone whose child wants to follow her.