Jodi Picoult

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

“The joke's on them. One little hypodermic wont' be enough. Split a piece of wood, and they'll find me. Lift up a stone, and they'll find me. Look in the mirror, and they'll find me...If you really want to know what makes someone a killer, ask yourself what would make you do it.”

“And sometimes, he was less lucid. He'd run around his cell like a caged animal; he'd rock back and forth; he'd swing from topic to topic as if it was the only way to cross the jungle of his thoughts. ”

“Your sister," I say evenly, "is incredibly sick. I'm sorry if that interferes with your dentist's appointment or your plan to go buy a pair of cleats. But those don't rate quite as high in the grand scheme of things right now. I'd think that since you're ten, you might be able to grow up enough to realize that the whole world doesn't always revolve around you." Jesse looks out the window, where Kate straddles the arm of an oak tree, coaching Anna in how to climb up. "Yeah, right, she's sick," he says. "Why don't you grow up? Why don't you figure out that the world doesn't revolve around her?" ... There is a scuffle on the other side of the door, and then it swings open. Blood covers Jesse's mouth, a vampire's lipstick; bits of wire stick out like a seamstress's pins. I notice the fork he is holding, and realize this is what he used to pull off his braces. "Now you never have to take me anywhere," he says.”

“That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes.I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt. ”

“Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles--they kept reality from paralyzing you”

“Love is the most dangerous craving of all, if you ask me. It turns us into people we aren't. It makes us feel like hell, and makes us walk on water. It ruins us for anything else.”

“You can boil your life down to a single suitcase, if you desperately have to. Ask yourself what you really need, and it won't be what you imagine - you will easily toss aside unfinished work, and bills, and your daily calendar to make room for the pair of flannel pajamas you wear when it rains; and the stone your child gave you that is shaped like a heart; and the battered paperback you revisit every April because it was what you were reading the first time you fell in love. It turns out that what's important is not everything that you've accumulated all these years, but those few things you can carry with you.”

“I have only known her for two years. But if you took every memory, every moment, if you stretched them end to end-they'd reach forever.”

“You can widen the feet of a compass, but they are still attached at the top; you can spin them away from each other, but you always wind up where you started.”

“...when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.”

“There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found.”

“...a witness is defined through what he sees, not what he says. And just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.”

“When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external...”

“And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.”

“When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

“The human capacity for burden is like bamboo- far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance.”

“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.”

“do you fix a wheel that isn't broken, or do you wait until the cart collapses?”

“true love is felonious… You take someone’s breath away… You rob them of the ability to utter a single word… You steal a heart.”

“I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in... It broke. ”

“if you think of a relationship as a living entity, I guess it's one thing if the missing two percent is, like, a fingernail. But when it's the heart, that's a whole different ball of wax.”

“The bottom line is that we never fall for the people we're supposed to.”

“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. ”

“Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you’d let them go. But now I look at you, and I dreamed about Maggie, and I see that I’ve been wrong. If you really love someone, Allie, I think you have to take them back.”

“When I'm with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that's backing up.”

“A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself.”

“and another claimed it was inherited through a parent who was a carrier of the defective gene. I had always assumed the latter was the case with Claire. After all, surely a child who grew out of grief would be born with a heavy heart.”

“I imagine the touch of someone who loves you so much, he cannot bear to watch you sleep; and so you wake up with his hand on your heart.”

“I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. And sometimes it’s not for quite as long as we would have expected or hoped. But it is still far better than never having had those children at all.”

“I think...she said finally, "that all of us have got our ghosts.”

“All it takes is a second and your whole life can get turned upside down.”

“There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.”

“You did really great up there,” I tell her, because I don’t know how to say what I really want to: that the people you love can surprise you every day. That maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it.”

“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.”

“But Katie knew it was a sin, had known from the moment she made the decision to lie with Adam. However, the transgression wasn't making love without the sanction of marriage. It was that for the first time in her life, Katie had put herself first. Put her own wants and needs above everything and everyone else.”

“If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.”

“Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's cart, and say, "Great. Maybe you can do a better job."Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast.Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.”

“remember that every fire will burn itself out, even without your help.”

“love doesn't follow the rules... nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable.”

“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. ”

“a guardian ad litem... GAL is appointed by a court to be a child's advocate during legal proceedings that involve a minor. You don't have to be a lawyer to be trained as a GAL, but you have to have a moral compass and a heart. Which, actually probably renders most lawyers unqualified for the job.”

“It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you.”

“people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.”

“There are always sides. There is always a winner and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give. ”

“A real friend isn't capable of feeling sorry for you.”

“But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone's expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.”

“But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.”

“Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.”

“I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.”