Jodi Picoult

“He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat.”

“It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.”

“My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding my father's shoulders at twilight, when I knew that if I held up my hands and spread my fingers like a net, I could catch the coming stars.”

“Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.”

“The mind is a remarcable thing. Just because you can’t see the wound doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting”

“What if it turns out that a life isn’t defined by who you belong to or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you’ve lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next?”

“That’s what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It’s a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion’s not about being holy...Just holier-than-thous.”

“Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.”

“Then they scrambled through the window and into the darkness, determined to turn themselves into what they were not.”

“When it's all over, you're remembered for what you did, not what you said you were going to do.”

“Cinta bukanlah suatu persamaan. Cinta bukan suatu kontrak, dan bukan suatu akhir yang bahagia. Cinta adalah papan tulis di bawah kapur tulis, tanah dari mana gedung-gedung muncul, dan oksigen dalam udara. Cinta adalah tempat aku kembali, ke mana pun aku pergi.”

“Jika kau memilih untuk mencari sesuatu, maka sebaiknya kau siap menghadapi apa pun yang kau temukan. Karena mungkin itu bukan seperti yang kau harapkan.”

“Bila kau mencintai seseorang, kau ingin agar ia memiliki semua yang didambakannya”

“People change, but only if you give them room to do it.”

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

“Exactly one month after he was convicted, when the lights were dimmed and the detention officers made a final sweep of the catwalk, Peter reached down and tugged off his right sock. He turned on his side in the lower bunk, so that he was facing the wall. He fed the sock into his mouth, stuffing it as far back as it would go.When it got hard to breathe, he fell into a dream. He was still eighteen, but it was the first day of kindergarten. He was carrying his backpack and his Superman lunch box. The orange school bus pulled up and, with a sigh, split open its gaping jaws. Peter climbed the steps and faced the back of the bus, but this time, he was the only student on it. He walked down the aisle to the very end, near the emergency exit. He put his lunch box down beside him and glanced out the rear window. It was so bright he thought the sun itself must be chasing them down the highway.'Almost there,' a voice said, and Peter turned around to look at the driver. But just as there had been no passengers, there was no one at the wheel.Here was the amazing thing: in his dream, Peter wasn't scared. He knew, somehow, that he was headed exactly where he'd wanted to go.”

“Peter curled his hands into fists at his sides. 'Kiss me,' he said.She leaned towards him slowly, until her face was too close to be in focus. Her hair fell over Peter's shoulder like a curtain and her eyes closed. She smelled like autumn-like apple cider and slanting sun and the snap of the coming cold. He felt his heart scrambling, caught inside the confines of his own body.Josie's lips landed just on the edge of his, almost his cheek and not quite his mouth. 'I'm glad I wasn't stuck in here alone,' she said shyly, and he tasted the words, sweet as mint on her breath.”

“Chicken,' Josie said. 'Have you ever been in love?'Peter looked at Josie, and thought of how they had once tied a note with their addresses to a helium balloon and let it go in her backyard, certain it would reach Mars. Instead, they had received a letter from a widow who lived two blocks away. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I think so.”

“Once, Lacy had been present at the birth of an infant that was missing half its heart. The family had known their child would not live; they chose to carry through with the pregnancy, in the hope that they could have a few brief moments on this earth with her before she was gone for good. Lacy had stood in a corner of the room as the parents held their daughter. She didn't study their faces; she just couldn't. Instead, she focused on the medical needs of that newborn. She watched it, still and frost-blue, move one tiny fist in slow motion, like an astronaut navigating space. Then, one by one, her fingers unfurled and she let go.”

“Peter took a shuddering breath. He wondered what his fish had thought, expecting the cool blue of the sea, only to wind up swimming in shit.”

“She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn't been thinking, she knew exactly what he'd felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.”

“You build a wall to keep something unwanted out … or to hold something precious in.”

“The nurses, I have already learned, are the ones who give us the answers we’re desperate for. Unlike the doctors, who fidget like they need to be somewhere else, the nurses patiently answer us as if we are the first set of parents to ever have this kind of meeting with them, instead of the thousandth.”

“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.”

“If you're afraid of everyone leaving you, what do you do?"Make them stay."And if you can't do that, or don't know how to?"Ellie shrugged. "I don't know."Yes, you do. In fact, you've done it. You leave first," Coop said, "so you don't have to watch them walk away.”

“She shrugged. "You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.”

“I wonder if you've got a minute."I have many minutes, all of them used toward a common purpose.”

“There are two kinds of love...in the safe kind you look for someone who's exactly like you. It's what most folks settle for. But then there's the other kind of love. Everyone's born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave that piece that's a perfect fit. You'll search for it forever, if you have to. And if you're lucky enough to find it, it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe I could look just as perfect. But then, of course, when you try to get close to their other half, you don't fit anymore. That kind of love...you come out of it a different person than you were when you started.”

“When you love someone more than he loves you, you'll do anything to switch the scales. You dress the way you think he'd like you to dress. You pick up his favorite figures of expression. You tell yourself that if you re-create yourself in his image, then he'll crave you in the same way you crave him.”

“They're fake bullets, so why do I feel like Im bleeding out?”

“And he made love to her, offering his body in both tenderness and anger, unsure which was the best way to pass her bits of his soul so that she could patch her own with it”

“A man should live his life a certain way not because of some divine authority, but because of a personal moral obligation to himself and others.”

“There are certain things I do not talk about.”

“What's worse ...?The devil you don't know ... or the devil you do?”

“It is the role of the BCYF caseworker to simply go along for the ride, so that if by some miracle it reaches the trial stage, everything has been done the way the government likes it.”

“The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.”

“Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?”

“Happiness is what you choose to remember.”

“Lie to yourself until it's true.”

“Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn'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.”

“it was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.”

“Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.”

“To be truly popular, it has to look like something you are, when in reality, it's what you make yourself. ”

“If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?”

“If you never go out on that limb, you're missing a hell of a view.”

“You're unwilling to go out on a limb because it just might break underneath you.”

“As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.”

“If it had been easy for Romeo to get to Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up.”

“If God wanted us to act on instinct, we wouldn't have the power of reason.”

“every now and then, i worry about people in the third world countries. and then i figure if they all started having sex, their lives would be considerably brighter.”