Jodi Picoult

“And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in masquerade.”

“Accidents did not just happen. From time to time they were carefully plotted, calculated, and arranged to one’s advantage-all, of course, under the cloak of happenstance.”

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

“Why are you doing this to yourself? When something bad happens, why do you have to pick at it until it bleeds all over again?”

“Lies were only as strong as the suckers that believed them.”

“For someone who can’t remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can’t forget.”

“Why do some memories bleed out of nowhere and others stay locked behind doors?”

“There was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher.”

“Or. I hate that word. It’s two letters long and stuffed to the gills with reasonable doubt.”

“When I was little, I used to pour salt on slugs. I liked watching them dissolve before my eyes. Cruelty is always sort of fun until you realize that something’s getting hurt. It would be one thing to be a loser if it meant that no one paid attention to you, but in school, it means you’re actively sought out. You’re the slug, and they’re holding all the salt. And they haven’t developed a conscience. There’s a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It’s when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question though, is why? I think part of it is self preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it’s banded together against an enemy. It doesn’t matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself. You know why salt works on slugs? Because it dissolved in the water that’s part of a slug’s skin, so the water on the inside its body starts to flow out. They slug dehydrates. This works with snails, too. And with leeches. And with people like me. With any creature, really, too thin-skinned to stand up for itself.”

“What’s the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you’re faking.”

“I think a persons life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the directors cut-the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way. There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you’ve survived, or the minutes you’ve been stuck there. Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over.”

“Once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?”

“We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.”

“On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger's. Like me, they're very smart. And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone.”

“You can't pay a landlord in dogma.”

“Maybe if God gives you a handicap, he makes sure you've got a few extra doses of humor to take the edge off.”

“Sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Life sometimes gets so bogged down in the details, you forget you are living it. There is always another appointment to be met, another bill to pay, another symptom presenting, another uneventful day to be notched onto the wooden wall. We have synchronized our watches, studied our calendars, existed in minutes, and completely forgotten to step back and see what we've accomplished.”

“Infatuation's just another word for not seeing clearly. When you start to love a person- that's when they become real”

“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?”

“How foolish it is to run away with a man who's already run away with someone else...”

“The way i see it, love is just a bigger, stickier form of trust.”

“I once heard someone on a bus say that this guy had gotten under her skin. And it struck me as a remarkable thought - that someone would affect you so deeply they'd always be a part of you.”

“There are some weapons you can't protect yourself against.”

“There's a lot of things you can't see if you aren't' looking.”

“You have everything," she said slowly, as if she were explaining the order of the world to a small child. "A family, a great job, a lot of people who look up to you. You've got a place to go home to." She smiled a little. "So go.”

“If you loved someone, really loved them, would you let them go?”

“Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.”

“Frankly, people don't make sense to me.' I nod in agreement. 'Frankly, people don't make sense to me either,' I say.”

“What being home-schooled has taught me, more than anything, is what a waste of a life high school is.”

“It's like the psychiatrists themselves are buying into that stupid belief that therapy is something to hide.”

“You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.”

“I leaned forward and kissed him. And again. As if I were passing him all those silent words I cound not say, the ones that explained my biggest secret: that I might not have OI but I knew how he (Adam) felt. That I was breaking apart, too, all the time."-Amelia”

“It is strange to think that we might have crossed paths, and still not have known what we were missing.”

“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.”

“A filament of sensation sizzled between them, like a thin string of kerosene that, for the love of a match, could turn into a wall of fire.”

“Raw love, like raw heartache, could blindside you.”

“A robber? In the trash bins? Honestly, Wes. This is Salem Falls, not the set of Law and Order.”

“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”

“There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion - that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it's too late.”

“You can make it dark, but I can't make it light.”

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

“Niekas nepradeda karo- ar bent jau ne vienas protingas zmogus neturetu jo pradeti - tvirtai nesuvokdamas, ka siuo karu jis ketina pasiekti ir kaip jis ketina kariauti.”

“Her hands quieted. "Yeah. Because even if the law says that no one is responsible for anyone else, helping someone who needs it is the right thing to do." I sat down beside her, close enough that the skin of her arm hummed right next to mine. "You really believe that?"She looked down at her lap "Yeah."Then how," I asked, "can you walk away from me?”

“There had been so many easy words between them that Daniel was guilty of nodding every now and then and tuning out the excess. He hadn't known, at the time, that he should have been hoarding these, like bits of sea glass hidden in the pocket of a winter coat to remind him that once it had been summer.”

“Do you remember the summer we signed you up for camp? And the night before you left, you said you've changed your mind and wanted to stay home? I told you to to get a seat on the left side of the bus, so when you pulled away, you'd be able to look back and see me there waiting for you." I press her hand against my cheek, hard enough to leave a mark. "You get that same seat in Heaven. One where you can watch me, watching you.”

“This time of night, the sky was flung wide open, stars spread like a story across the horizon.”