Jodi Picoult Quotes

You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?

Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.

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?

When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn't.

You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?

Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.

and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.

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.

I, um, I have this problem. I broke up with my boyfriend, you see. And I'm pretty upset about it, so I wanted to talk to my best friend. [...] The thing is, they're both you.

You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.

There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light.

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

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.

The bottom line is that we never fall for the people we're supposed to.

It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.

It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you.

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

Sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.

Love is not a because, it's a no matter what.

Did you ever walk through a room that's packed with people, and feel so lonely you can hardly take the next step?

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.

When you love someone you let them take care of you.

The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies

You make yourself strong because it's expected of you. You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be.

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.

A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch.

Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it.

You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken.

It's 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.

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

Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up.

I'm lonely. 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 it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.

In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future.

It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.

Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.

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's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you.

Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed

I learn from my own daughter that you don’t have to be awake to cry.

Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.

Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?

I don't think we get a choice in who we fall for," Ian whispers. "I think we just do.

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.

See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it

A real friend isn't capable of feeling sorry for you.

Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.

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.

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

If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

You couldn't have strength without weakness, you couldn't have light without dark, you couldn't have love without loss

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.

There are always sides. There is always a winner and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.

You know someone's right for you when the things they don't have to say are even more important than the things they do.

Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.

When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.

In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn; color your hair; watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five. In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world; or you can just jump off it.

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.

You can't exist in this world without leaving a piece of yourself behind.

You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake.

Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?

When we're awake, we see what we need to see. When we're asleep, we see what is really there.

There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.

It took me a lifetime to realizethings don't get lost if they don't have value- you don't miss what you don't care about.

I didn't want to see her because it would make me feel better. I came because without her, it's hard to remember who I am...

Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far.

words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.

Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.

What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?

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

Change is a funny thing. We never are quite sure what we are becoming or even why. Then one day we look at ourselves and wonder who we are and how we got that way. Only one thing about change remains constant...it is always painful

As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.

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.

Shooting stars are not stars at all. They re just rocks that enter the atmosphere and catch fire under friction. What we wish on when we see one is only a trail of debris.

Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.

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.

Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong.

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 you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.

He insisted that stars were people so well loved, they were traced in constellations, to live forever

What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.

Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.

There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.

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 it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.

Do you know what it's like to love someone so much, that you can't see yourself without picturing her? Or what it's like to touch someone, and feel like you've come home? What we had wasn't about sex, or about being with someone just to show off what you've got, the way it was for other kids our age. We were, well, meant to be together. Some people spend their whole lives looking for that one person. I was lucky enough to have her all along.

Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you’d let them go. But now I look at you, and I dreamed about Maggie, and I see that I’ve been wrong. If you really love someone, Allie, I think you have to take them back.

There are two kinds of love...in the safe kind you look for someone who's exactly like you. It's what most folks settle for. But then there's the other kind of love. Everyone's born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave that piece that's a perfect fit. You'll search for it forever, if you have to. And if you're lucky enough to find it, it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe I could look just as perfect. But then, of course, when you try to get close to their other half, you don't fit anymore. That kind of love...you come out of it a different person than you were when you started.

When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart. You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like.

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.

Someone real," I hear myself saying. "Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who's 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 I've known my whole life, even if I haven't.

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face. For years, parents tell you that you can be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she'd been so eager to grow up-until she got to adolescence and hit a big fat wall ofreality. As it turned out, she couldn't have anything she wanted. You didn't get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn't control your own destiny, you were too busy trying to fit in.