Jodi Picoult

“This is just my way of pointing out that we people who leap without looking are not stupid. We know damn well we might be headed for a fall. But we also know that, sometimes, it's the only way out.”

“But Edward doesn't even flinch; it's as if he's reading the text of me with some magic internal Rosetta stone that makes him understand what I say is not what I mean at all.”

“When the news you don't want to hear is looming before you like Everest, two things can happen. Tragedy can run you through like a sword, or it can become your backbone. Either you fall apart and sob, or you say, 'Right. What's next?”

“The real power of a wolf isn't in its fearsome jaws, which can clench with fifteen hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. The real power of a wolf is having that strength, and knowing when not to use it.”

“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.”

“Remember when you were a little kid and you'd fall asleep in the car? And someone would carry you out and put you into bed, so that when you woke up in the morning, you knew automatically you were home again? That's what I think it's like to die.”

“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.”

“Heroes don't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they don't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.”

“Dark matter has a gravitation effect on other objects. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.”

“Maybe if you spend your life pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren't really yours.”

“Summertime, I think, is a collective unconscious. We all remember the notes that made up the song of the ice cream man; we all know what it feels like to brand our thighs on a playground slide that's heated up like a knife in a fire; we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beating across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little longer than the last one, when in fact it's all going in the other direction.”

“Ketika kau hanya memiliki palu, semuanya tampak seperti paku”

“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.”

“Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn't even know existed.”

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

“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.”

“Many trees have died so that the Catholic Church can preach against homosexuality.”

“Isn't it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?”

“But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.”

“What you notice is the loneliness. Daniel started to isolate himself, because it hurt less than being pushed away.”

“Kid says to me, "You play baseball? What position? Left out?" and gets a big laugh from the rest of the class. Kid is only one person out of 6.792 billion humans on this planet. This planet is only one-eighth of the solar system, whose sun is one of two billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Put it that way, the comment loses it's importance.”

“When Em and I got back together, I could see that she had never been less than what I'd figured her to be. If anything, she was always better than I remebered. And that what I think love is [...] When your hindsight´s twenty-twenty, and you still wouldn´t change a thing.”

“These days it seemed like the words between them were there only to outline the silences.”

“She turned to stare out the window, lost in a thousand thoughts, not a single one of which Danielle could guess.”

“...he glanced at the stranger in the seat beside him and tried to remember when she used to be his daughter.”

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

“In psychoanalytical theory there is a phenomenon called transference. The therapist becomes a blank screen, onto which the patient projects some incident or feeling that began in childhood... it would not be a far reach for someone to look at my feelings for Jess and assume that, in the context of our relationship as tutor and pupil, I am not in love. I'm just in transference.”

“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?”

“Jacob's room is the place entropy goes to die.”

“You couldn't argue the facts; you could only change the lens through which you looked at them".”

“Go fuck yourself Judge.""Motion denied." answers the judge dryly.”

“The old man was cranky, bitter bastard, but it’s the thorn in your side that leaves the biggest hole.”

“There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots s there are in the bright ones.”

“I do know that there are some things, though, that occur without a direct line of antecedents.”

“Dylan Jerome," the lawyer admits, "wanted to sue God for not caring enough about him.”

“My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn’t all about me?”

“The first time she kissed me, I truly thought I'd had an aneurysm - my pulse was thundering so loud and my senses were exploding. This, I remember thinking, the only word I could hold on to in a sea of feelings.”

“They look up at me and see a rich lady in maternity clothes. They don't realize I am one of them.”

“Imagine if you were the positive pole of a magnet, and you were told that under no circumstances were you allowed to touch that negative pole that was sucking you in like a black hole. Or if you crawled out of the desert and found a woman standing with a pitcher of ice water, but she held it out of your reach. Imagine jumping off a building, and then being told not to fall. That's what it feels like to want a drink.”

“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.”

“And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.”

“Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?”

“The first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wond one day and heal the next.”

“Asking me to describe my son is like asking me to hold the ocean in a paper cup”

“Do you know how, when you are on the verge of a breakdown, the world pounds in your ears; a rush of blood, of consequence? Do you now how it feels when the truth cuts your tongue to ribbons, and still you have to speak it?”

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

“Where did you go?""To the end of the driveway," my mother says. "I was nine months pregnant; that was the maximum distance I could waddle without feeling as if my uterus was falling out."I wince. "Do you have to be quite so graphic?""What would you like me to call it, Zoe? A fetal living room?”

“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.”

“I would tell them that when you look at a person, you never know what the're hiding.”

“You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.”