Jodi Picoult Quotes

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

~ Jodi Picoult

You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.

~ Jodi Picoult

I [Jacob Hunt, Aspie] see it as the next step of evolution: I cannot take away your sadness, so why should I acknowledge it?

~ Jodi Picoult

You always knew after shitty things happened, who your friends really were.

~ Jodi Picoult

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.

~ Jodi Picoult

The only monsters I have ever known were men.

~ Jodi Picoult

My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.

~ Jodi Picoult

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.

~ Jodi Picoult

When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.

~ Jodi Picoult

Sometimes we don't know we're dreaming, we can't even fathom that we're asleep.

~ Jodi Picoult

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

~ 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? The last photograph you had of your mother? A birthday gift from your best friend--a bookmark embroidered by her? A ticket stub from the traveling circus that had come through town two years ago, where you and your father held your breath as jeweled ladies flew through the air, and a brave man stuck his head in the mouth of a lion? Would you take them to make wherever you were going feel like home, or because you needed to remember where you had come from?

~ Jodi Picoult

That's the life, she said to me, as we watched a puppy chase its own tail. That's what I want to be next.I had laughed. you would wind up as a cat, I told her. They don't need anyone else.I need you, she replied.Well, I said. Maybe I'll come back as catnip.

~ Jodi Picoult

Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place, maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.

~ Jodi Picoult

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

~ Jodi Picoult

What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead.

~ Jodi Picoult

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.

~ Jodi Picoult

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand.I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

~ Jodi Picoult

She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.

~ Jodi Picoult

The cost of growth is always a small act of violence.

~ Jodi Picoult

When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn't.

~ Jodi Picoult

My first strike was marrying a guy without a college degree. My second and third were getting pregnant. I suppose that when I didn't go on to become the next Gloria Allred, she was justified in counting me a failure. And I suppose that until now, I was justified in thinking that I wasn't one.

~ Jodi Picoult

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

~ Jodi Picoult

by now you've already formed your own impression. you believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person's past has nothing to do with his future. you think i am either a hero, or a monster. maybe knowning more about circumstances will make you think differently about me, but it won't change what happened twenty-eight years ago.

~ Jodi Picoult

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

~ Jodi Picoult

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

~ Jodi Picoult

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

~ Jodi Picoult

Suffering so someone else didn't have to suffer. Sacrificing your body for someone else's well being.

~ Jodi Picoult

The way I see it, he's all we have left ofher.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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