Top 1119 Quotes & Sayings by Jodi Picoult - Page 2

if you tell yourself you feel fine, you will.

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.

The ability to find sparks may be buried so deep in you that you stop believing there's a God. Until someone comes along, with so much light in her that you can't help but see your own, and when you're together,that light grows even brighter.

I think that ordinary people who are placed in extraordinary circumstances find themselves pushed beyond their limits, and learn new truths about themselves.

The more you get past pain, the more it goes from coal to diamond.

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.

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.

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

I don't know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it's the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now...if she is somewhere. It's the question mark that comes with death that we can't face, not the period.

Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.

When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires.

maybe there is more to a person than a body and a mind. maybe something else figures into the mix— not a soul, exactly, but a spirit that hints you might one day be greater, stronger than you are now. a promise; a potential.

You can touch everything and be connected to nothing.

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

They say that there are moments that open up your life like a walnut cracked, that change your point of view so that you never look at things the same way again.

Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.

Beliefs are the roads we take to our dreams. Believe you can do something-or believe you can't-and you'll be right everytime.

I have loved before, but it didn’t feel like this. I have kissed before, but it didn’t burn me alive. Maybe it lasts a minute, and maybe it’s an hour. All I know is that kiss, and how soft her skin is when it brushes against mine, and that, even if I did not know it until now, I have been waiting for this person forever.

She's not classically beautiful, but somehow that only makes her more interesting.

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.

To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a set of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.

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.

Here are the things I know for sure: When you think you're right, you are most likely wrong. Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole. And, in spite of what I said, you can miss a person you've never known. I learn this over and over again.

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.

Someone once told me that when you give birth to a daughter, you've just met the person whose hand you'll be holding the day you die.

Mistakes are like the memories you hide in an attic: old love letters from relationships that tanked, photos of dead relatives, toys from a childhood you miss. Out of sight is out of mind, but somewhere deep inside you know they still exist. And you also know that you're avoiding them.

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

The right idea is the one you can't stop thinking about; the one that's in your head first thing in the morning.

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.

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.

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

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.

It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place--because we become better people in it.

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.

the letters are mixed up. U and I should be together.

Religion isn't in your DNA. you don't believe just because your parents believe.

There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

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.

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

When you finally start to write something, do not let yourself stop...even when you are convinced it's the worst garbage ever. This is the biggest caveat for beginning writers. Instead, force yourself to finish what you began, and THEN go back and edit it.

When you are attracted to people, it's because of the details. Their kindness. Their eyes. The fact that they can get you to laugh when you need it the most.

There are millions of people in the world, and the spirits will see that most of them you never have to meet. But there are one or two you are tied to, and the spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right.

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.

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

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.

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 only difference between a wish and a prayer is that you're at the mercy of the universe for the first, and you've got some help with the second.

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

I believe that having something to hope for - even if it's just a better tomorrow- is the most powerful drug on this planet.

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

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

I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you've got, instead of what you don't.

The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.

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

And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

I think once you sign on to be a mother, that's the only shift they offer.

Music therapy, to me, is music performance without the ego. It's not about entertainment as much as its about empathizing. If you can use music to slip past the pain and gather insight into the workings of someone else's mind, you can begin to fix a problem.

She became whoever she needed to be to survive,but she never let anyone else define her.

The world just feels different for those of us who come alive after dark. It's more fragile and unreal, a replica of the one everyone else inhabits.