Jodi Picoult Quotes - Page 9

How come love sounds so violent? You fall head over heels. You’re struck by Cupid’s arrow. You take the risk of having your heart broken. From an outside perspective, it sounds impossibly painful, not worth the trouble. And yet we do it every day. We keep coming back for more. Why? If it weren’t so perilous, maybe we wouldn’t crave it so much. Maybe it has to be brutal, in order to work. People come in so many shapes and sizes that it takes a bit of force in order to fit together perfectly. But you know what they say about a break that heals: it’s always stronger than before.

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

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

Children are supposed to go to school, play on swing sets, skin their knees.

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.

...courage wasn’t something you were bequeathed at birth, and it wasn’t a lack of fright. It was overcoming your fear, because the ones you love mattered more.

When they laugh, it sounds like confetti.

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

I am not a religious man. I have not attended a service for many years. But I do believe in God. My own practice of religion, you could say, it a nonpractice. I personally feel that it's just as worthy on a weekend to rake the lawns of an elderly neighbor or to climb a mountain and marvel at the beauty of this land we live in as it is to sing hosannas or go to Mass. In other words, I think every many finds his own church- and not all of them have four walls - Judge Haig (Page 399)

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

Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

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

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.

Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he'd promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again.

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.

There's a problem with wounded birds, Cassie," Connor said. "Either they fly away from you one day, or else they never get better. They stay hurt no matter what you do.

I can't do this to you,' he said, drawing back. Emily put her hand on his and pulled the gun to her temple. 'Then do it for me,' she said.

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.

Is it really worth dying for the person you lo

You can miss a person you've never known.

Where you come from does matter -- but not nearly as much as where you are headed.

She didn't like it when religious folks looked down on her for being an atheist; but to be honest, I didn't see how this was any different from the way she looked down on people for being Christians.

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.

For God's sake, if I learned anything during this damn trial it's that the only way someone can leave you is if you let them. And I'm not doing that, Dee. It may look like that today, or tomorrow, or even a month from now, but one day you're going to wake up and see that this whole time you've been gone, you've only been headed back to where you started. And I'll be there, waiting." He leans forward and kisses me once, feather-light, on the lips. "It's not like I'm not letting you go," he murmurs. "I'm just trusting you enough to come back.

Go fuck yourself Judge.""Motion denied." answers the judge dryly.

I want to believe there's a God. Because I sure as hell know there's a devil.

The only thing they'll let you shoot with a camera.

My grandmother lived a remarkable life. She watched her nation fall to pieces; and even when she became collateral damage, she believed in the power of the human spirit. She gave when she had nothing; she fought when she could barely stand; she clung to tomorrow when she couldn’t find footing on the rock ledge of yesterday. She was a chameleon, slipping into the personae of a privileged young girl, a frightened teen, a dreamy novelist, a proud prisoner, an army wife, a mother hen. She became whomever she needed to be to survive, but she never let anyone else define her. By anyone’s account, her existence had been full, rich, important—even if she chose not to shout about her past, but rather to keep it hidden. It had been nobody’s business but her own; it was still nobody’s business.

It still hurts," she whispered. "Even when you're doing it for someone else, that doesn't stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.

The Native Americans know that wolves are mirrors for humans. What they show us are our strengths and weaknesses... When I lived with the wolves, I was proud of the reflection of myself. But when I came back, I always paled in comparison.

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

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. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.

A robber? In the trash bins? Honestly, Wes. This is Salem Falls, not the set of Law and Order.

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

It turned out people truly did cry into their coffee cups.

What he did was wrong. He doesn't deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it's choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you.

If you don't want somwone to change your life for you, you've got to change it yourself. (Vanishing Acts, pg. 339)

Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max's hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It's a note I have never heard - this chord of pure pain - and it takes a moment to realize it is coming from me.

If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been-what would you take?

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.

if i'm going to fuck up my life, does it really matter which way i do it?.