Top 1119 Quotes & Sayings by Jodi Picoult - Page 3

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

The optimist in me wants to believe sexuality will eventually become like handwriting: there’s no right way and wrong way to do it. We’re all just wired differently. It's also worth noting that when you meet someone, you never bother to ask if he’s right or left-handed. After all: does it really matter to anyone other than the person holding the pen?

I'm grateful for my children, who are slowly emerging to become their own wonderful, interesting, compassionate young adults - which makes me believe that along the way I must have done something right.

One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.

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

If words had flavors, hers would be bitter almonds and coffee grounds.

I believed the reason there was a God was to prevent such atrocities from happening to the same person twice. But nothing prepared me for this: I have done what I've sworn I could never do; I have become my own nightmare... I have lost control.

I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.

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.

If you were drifting with a thousand other people, could you really still say you were lost?

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.

He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable

I know what love is. When you find the person you are supposed to love, bells ring and fireworks go off in your head and you can't find the words to speak and you think about him all the time. When you find the person you are supposed to love, you will know by staring deeply into their eyes.

My favorite part of any event is a Q&A. I do get asked a lot of the same questions but every now and then someone surprises me - and I LOVE that.

Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?

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.

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.

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.

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.

People work too hard to figure out the meaning of their lives. Why me, why now. The truth is, sometimes things don't happen to you for a reason. Sometimes it's just about being in the right place at the right time for someone else.

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.

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.

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.

But you could only remake your own future, not anyone else's, and for some people that just wasn't good enough.

Every life has a soundtrack.

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?

Writing is grunt work - you need to have self-motivation, perseverance, and faith... talent is the smallest part of it.

If you choose to be looking for something, you'd better be ready for whatever it is you are find. Because it may not be what you've been expecting.

Ross believed in past lives. Moreover, he believed that the person you fell in love with in each life was the same person you fell in love with in the life before, and the one before that. Sometimes, you might miss her - she'd be reborn in post-World War I generation, and you wouldn't come back until the fifties. Sometimes, your paths would cross and you wouldn't recognize each other. Get it right - that is: fall madly, truly, deeply - and perhaps there'd be an eternity carved out solely for the two of you.

But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?

Close a door, and you'd still feel a breeze through the window.

Relationships always sounded so physically painful: you fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars?

Bleeding heart, he’d called her. Well. He should know. He’d been the first to rip it to pieces.

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

My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.

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

I don’t think anyone who falls in love has a choice. You’re just pulled to that person like true north, whether it’s good for you or bound to break your heart.

In fairytales, when the mask came off, the handsome prince still loved the girl, no matter what -and that alone would turn her into a princess.

I have always envied people who believe strongly in religion, people who could face a tragedy by praying and know that it would be all right. As unscientific as it seems, well, it would be nice to lay the responsibilities and pain on someone else's larger shoulders.

I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room-but eventually, you learn to live with it.

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

Tradionally, parents made decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down.

We dont have to accept each others beliefs..but we do have to accept each others right to believe them.

I’d much rather pretend I’m somewhere else, and any time I open the pages of a book, that happens.

This is love, I think. A place where people who have been alone may lock together like hawks and spin in the air, dizzy with surprise at the connection. A place you go willingly, and with wonder

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.

When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point taht wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.

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

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

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.

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

The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.

Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans: once you leave the litter, you server contact with your mothers.

An apology with a defense built in isn't much of an apology

That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

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

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times I stayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that my father worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to come home to a house that felt too big for us.

Believe me, Being gay is not a choice. Noone would choose to make life harder than it has to be.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

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