Top 1119 Quotes & Sayings by Jodi Picoult - Page 17

And I think, not for the first time, that what is immoral is not always wrong.

in nineteen minutes you can norder a pizza and have it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem. In nineteen minutes you can get revenge.

Religion was supposed to be a blanket drawn up to your chin to keep you warm, a promise that when it came to the end, you wouldn't die alone - but it could just as easily leave you shivering out in the cold, if WHAT you believed became more important than the fact THAT you believed.

i'm sure i'm worth a lot more dead than alive

I think you're the only person who gets me. When I'm with you, the world doesn't feel like a problem I can't figure out. Please come to the dance, because you're my music.

It's just like nurses in a hospital tend to know more than the doctors most of the time; if you really want to get the answers to a question about court, you should spend more time buttering up the clerks than the judges.

A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself.

I think...she said finally, "that all of us have got our ghosts.

I'm not saying you did the wrong thing. I'm not even saying it wasn't something I'd thought of doing, myself. But even if it was the just thing to do, or the fitting thing, it still wasn't the right thing.

Justification is a remarkable thing-takes all those solid lines and blurs them, so that honor becomes as supple as a willow, and ethics burst like soap bubbles.

Scars are just a treasure map for pain you've buried too deep to remember.

There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found.

It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.

Just when you think you've got your life by the reins, that's when it's most likely to run away with you.

All it takes is a second and your whole life can get turned upside down.

There's an honesty to the wolf world that is liberating. There's no diplomacy, no decorum. You tell your enemy you hate him; you show your admiration by confessing the truth. That directness doesn't work with humans, who are masters of subterfuge. Does this dress make me look fat? Do you really love me? Did you miss me? When a person asks this, she doesn't want to know the real answer. She wants you to lie to her. After two years of living with wolves, I had forgotten how many lies it takes to build a relationship.

I know what it's like when the things you believe make you feel like you're on the outside looking in.

You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.

When someone loves you up one side and down the other like that, you make every effort to stick around.

You’ll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you’re still the one in control.

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

The best parenting advice I ever got was from a labor nurse who told me the following: 1. After your baby gets here, the dog will just be a dog. 2. The terrible twos last through age three. 3. Never ask your child an open-ended question, such as "Do you want to go to bed now?" You won't want to hear the answer, believe me. "Do you want me to carry you upstairs, or do you want to walk upstairs to go to bed?" That way, you get the outcome you want and they feel empowered.

I wonder if what makes a family a family isn't doing everything right all the time but, instead, giving a second chance to the people you love who do things wrong.

When she smiles, it feels like the first warm day of March-- after an eternity of snow, when you suddenly remember how summer feels on the backs of your bare calves & in the part of your hair.

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

But Katie knew it was a sin, had known from the moment she made the decision to lie with Adam. However, the transgression wasn't making love without the sanction of marriage. It was that for the first time in her life, Katie had put herself first. Put her own wants and needs above everything and everyone else.

there's something nice about knowing that i'm not the only one who doesn't quite fit the part.

And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it's gone, so are you.

I didn't think i could possibly love another baby as much as I loved the one I'd already had," I continue. "But the strangest thing happened when I held you for the first time. It was like my heart suddenly unfolded. Like there was this secret space I didn't even know existed, and there was room for both of you." I stare at her. "Once my feelings were stretched like that, there was no going back. Without you, it just would have felt empty.

Does fate ever play by the rules?

What's stronger-the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

You can widen the feet of a compass, but they are still attached at the top; you can spin them away from each other, but you always wind up where you started.

But what if your obsession has nothing to do with drugs or thrills or money? What if what you want most in the world is to recapture the way life was a week, a month, a year ago-and you are willing to do whatever it takes?

The first time someone I loved left me behind...I didn't know how my family would balance. We had been such a sturdy little end table, four solid legs. I was sure we would now be off-kilter, always unstable. Until one day I looked more closely, and realized that we had simply become a stool.

Because hate's just the flip side of love. Like heads and tails on a dime. If you don't know what it feels like to love someone, how would you know what hate is? One can't exist without the other.

That's because you've never been one. You haven't spent years wearing someone else's clothes, taking someone else's name, living in someone else's houses, and working someone else's job to fit in. And if you don't sell out, then you run away... proving you're the Gypsy they said you were all along.

so i do what i do best. i move in the opposite direction.

She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.

You fell in love with someone because of the tilt of his smile, or because he could make you laugh, or in this case, because he made you believe that you were the only one who could save him.

Life was all about being in a certain place, at a certain time.

It was nice not having to be the one in control, for a little while. It was nice to be the one who was protected, instead of the one who'd been protecting eveyone else.

Maybe honesty is overvalued. What's truly priceless is picking out from a stream of falsehoods the ones you most need to hear.

Somewhere along the line, organized religion stopped being about faith, and started being about who had the power to keep the faith. You said that the purpose of religion was to bring people together. But does it, really? Or does it-knowingly, purposefully, and intentionally--break them apart?

Dead isn’t angels or ghosts. It’s a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage.

Like Connor, Alex protected me -and he was the only person I let close enough to do it. Like Connor, Alex could finish my sentences before I did. But unlike Connor, for whom I had ultimately come too late, I was just in time to take care of Alex.

But still, it looked completely natural, as if we had been kissing at the ends of sentences for ages, while the rest of the world was still hung up on punctuation.

It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.

You came back fighting and furious at me. You told me you'd been looking for mermaids, and I interrupted you. [...] I said that next time, you had to take me with you." "Was there a next time?" "Well, you tell me, you don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?

...when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.

Turn around, and the people you thought you knew might change. Your little boy might now live half a world away. Your beautiful daughter might be sneaking out at night. Your ex-husband might by dying by degrees. This is the reason that dancers learn, early on, how to spot while doing pirouettes: we all want to be able to find the place where we started.

Just so you know, when they say "Once upon a time” . . . they’re lying

If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can't someone be healed by happiness?

Campbell" Julia says "Don't do this to me" "Do what?" "Push me off the same cliff twice

It just goes to show you: you can put nine insane miles between you and another person. You can make a vow to never speak his name. You can surgically remove someone from your life. And still, he'll haunt you.

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

Me, I was already jaded and tarnished, skeptical that a fantasy world could keep reality at bay.

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital... Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain.

There's no way to convince her that just because you put half. planet between you and someone else, you can't drive that person out of your thoughts. Believe me. I've tried.

I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.

Men. You can't live with them...and you can't legally shoot them. I tossed out my husband eight years ago and got a llama instead. Best decision I ever made.