Jodi Picoult

“Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.”

“There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.”

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

“Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.”

“What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.”

“No," he said calmly, filled with purpose. he took her arms lightly in his hands and shook her. "I am not giving you up."Emily looked at him, and for just a moment he could read her thoughts. Melanie use to say they were like twins, with their own secret, silent language. in that instant, Chris felt her fear and her resignation, and the knotty pain of coming up against a brick wall again and again. She glanced away, and he could breathe again. "The thing is, Chris" Emily said, "it's not your choice.”

“Superheroes were born in the minds of people desperate to be rescued.”

“You couldn't have strength without weakness, you couldn't have light without dark, you couldn't have love without loss”

“He insisted that stars were people so well loved, they were traced in constellations, to live forever”

“No matter who you are, there is always some part of you that wishes you were someone else, and when, for a millisecond, you get that wish, it's a miracle.”

“You can touch everything and be connected to nothing.”

“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 mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.”

“It was one think to make a mistake, it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.”

“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.”

“I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.”

“We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?”

“The thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart of a soul mate.”

“Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.”

“The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do.”

“The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.”

“Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.”

“The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.”

“The Inuit say that the stars are holes in heaven. And every time we see the people we loved shining through, we know they're happy. ”

“Or in other words, it's the substance you've got when you start that determines the outcome.”

“There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.”

“You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake.”

“You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.”

“A lie took two parties - the weaver of the tale and the sucker who so badly wanted to believe it.”

“After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken.”

“There is a place in you that you don't even know exists, where you can simply stand back and watch without feeling any pain.”

“Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.”

“Some people don't know what to do with an act of kindness.”

“What you had could never make up for what you'd lost.”

“She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.”

“You might have to lose control before you could find out what you'd been missing.”

“What she hadn't realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you'd felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.”

“I know how difficult it can be when the image you've had of something doesn't match its reality; when the friend beside you turns into a monster.”

“One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.”

“But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?”

“Torn between fear and something that resembled love, she wrestled with questions she never dreamed she would face: How could she leave? Then again, how could she stay?”

“All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face. For years, parents tell you that you can be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she'd been so eager to grow up-until she got to adolescence and hit a big fat wall ofreality. As it turned out, she couldn't have anything she wanted. You didn't get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn't control your own destiny, you were too busy trying to fit in.”

“When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes? When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit's face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end.I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA.Here's a secret: those mothers don't exist. Most of us-even if we'd never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring.I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone.Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping-and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press-seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood.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 car, 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.If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt.Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they'd chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal.Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they'll be looking and looking for ages. Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.”

“My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.”

“Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.”

“Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There is only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.”

“There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.”

“She'd been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. 'You are so beautiful,' her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders.'You are so full of shit,' Lila snarled, but as a contraction settled over her like a net, she bore down and pushed.”

“Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.”

“Energy can't be destroyed, only converted into something different. So when a person dies, where does that energy go?”

“A saguaro can fall for a snowman but where would they set up house?”