Jodi Picoult Quotes - Page 4

Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and may be never really had.
Jodi Picoult
Is his work vengeance? Or Justice? There is the finest line between the two and when i try to focus on it, it becomes less and less clear.
Jodi Picoult
A trial, it often came down to who had the best story.
Jodi Picoult
Choices are funny things-ask a native tribe that's eaten grubs and roots forever if they're unhappy, and they'll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don't know there's an alternative, you can't miss it.
Jodi Picoult
If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.
Jodi Picoult
He's an egotistical dickhead who's going to chew you up and spit you out; and you have a really awful history of falling for assholes that you ought to run screaming from; and I don't feel like sitting around listening to you try to convince yourself you don't still feel something for Campbell Alexander when, in fact, you've spent the past fifteen years trying to fill in the hole he made inside you.
Jodi Picoult
Do you know what it's like to give your whole self to a person, and your whole heart to boot, until you've got nothing left to give- and then realize that it still isn't whay they need?
Jodi Picoult
Campbell" Julia says "Don't do this to me""Do what?""Push me off the same cliff twice
Jodi Picoult
I realized it was like looking into the sun—you shouldn't do it, because you'd turn your face away and be blind to everything else.
Jodi Picoult
You don't have to say anything if you don't want to."Anna lies down, her head pillowed against my shoulder. Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas—a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.
Jodi Picoult
We fall back into silence. I look around XO Café and notice that chatter happens mostly at tables where the diners are young and hip. The older couples, the ones sporting wedding bands that wink with their silverware, eat without the pepper of conversation. Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?
Jodi Picoult
We sit for a few more moments, although there's really nothing left to say. This is new to me, too, an entire conversation that takes place in silence, because the heart has its own language. I will remember what Eric says even though he doesn't say a word. I will tell it to her.
Jodi Picoult
Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.
Jodi Picoult
Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.
Jodi Picoult
[There's a] point where you have to leave the dough alone. It's silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.
Jodi Picoult
You know, that was what we missed most. Not our beds, not our homes, not even our mothers. We would talk about food.
Jodi Picoult
I learned a long time ago with you that folks who were trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you've done your job - no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.
Jodi Picoult
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 that you’re willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you've lost yourself.
Jodi Picoult
There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?
Jodi Picoult
But kids don't stay where they're supposed to. You turn around and find her not in the bedroom but hiding in a closet; you turn around and see she's not three but thirteen. Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.
Jodi Picoult
I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?
Jodi Picoult
If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.
Jodi Picoult
We're [parents]) always bluffing, pretending we know best, when most of the time we're just praying we won't screw up too badly.
Jodi Picoult
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.
Jodi Picoult
We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?
Jodi Picoult
I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.
Jodi Picoult
Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.
Jodi Picoult
(24/7) once you sign on to be a mother, that's the only shift they offer.
Jodi Picoult
What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.
Jodi Picoult
She's not classically beautiful, but somehow that only makes her more interesting.
Jodi Picoult
Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles--they kept reality from paralyzing you
Jodi Picoult
The first Abenaki word I ever learned was Bitawbagok – the word they use for Lake Champlain. It means, literally, the waters between. Since I’ve come back from Quebec, I have thought of my address as Bitawkdakinna. I don’t know enough Abenaki to be sure it’s a real word, but translated, it is the world between. I had become a bridge between the natural world and the human one. I fit into both places and belonged to neither. Half of my heart lived with the wild wolves, the other half lived with my family.
Jodi Picoult
For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.
Jodi Picoult
Something still exists as long as there's someone still around to remember it.
Jodi Picoult
When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.
Jodi Picoult
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.
Jodi Picoult
You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.
Jodi Picoult
As Lacy waited for her turn to speak on Peter's behalf, she thought back to the first time she realized she could hate her own child.
Jodi Picoult
You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.
Jodi Picoult
It's not because I don't want to hurt Delia's feelings. It's because when she is bruised, I'm the one who aches.
Jodi Picoult
The feeling that she was going to explode, that she was too big for her own skin.
Jodi Picoult
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.
Jodi Picoult
This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty.
Jodi Picoult
I want to believe there's a God. Because I sure as hell know there's a devil.
Jodi Picoult
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?
Jodi Picoult
I like the word ‘evil’. Scramble it a little and you will get ‘vile’ and ‘live’. ‘Good’, on the other hand, is just a command to ‘go do’.
Jodi Picoult
She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.
Jodi Picoult
I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)
Jodi Picoult
From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest.Darkness, you know, is relative.
Jodi Picoult
Isn’t that what true romance issupposed to be about? Finding the person who’s your soul mate. Someone you dream about at night. Someone whose name is on your lips when you wake up in the morning.
Jodi Picoult
At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.
Jodi Picoult
It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound and more like a poultice.
Jodi Picoult
And oh she had been broken. She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall
Jodi Picoult
You know how I get angry sometimes? That's because it's the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I'm really here.
Jodi Picoult
I just completed The Tenth Circle. It is an excellent mystery story surrounding a family with modern day issues.
Jodi Picoult
I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live
Jodi Picoult
She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life.
Jodi Picoult
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.
Jodi Picoult
The way I see it, he's all we have left ofher.
Jodi Picoult
Suffering so someone else didn't have to suffer. Sacrificing your body for someone else's well being.
Jodi Picoult