Jodi Picoult

“Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.”

“When we're awake, we see what we need to see. When we're asleep, we see what is really there.”

“Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong. ”

“I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?”

“There are millions of people in the world, and the spirits will see that most of them you never have to meet. But there are one or two you are tied to, and the spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right.”

“There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light.”

“A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch.”

“You can believe something really hard,' Faith says, 'and still be wrong.”

“The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies”

“What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?”

“It's choice that makes us human.”

“Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.”

“It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.”

“Things had a way of working out for the best when you let them run their course.”

“It's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you.”

“At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. 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 milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.”

“I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere.”

“Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.”

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

“How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?”

“You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.”

“Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.”

“You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed - the length of a sleeping baby's eyelash, the span of a child's hand. Life turns on a dime, and - it turns out - so does one's conscience.”

“and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.”

“When you love someone you let them take care of you.”

“So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?”

“What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.”

“My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.”

“Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.”

“It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.”

“Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?”

“And the very act of living is a tide; at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded”

“You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”

“See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it”

“There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you.”

“Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.”

“If you want to see God laugh, make a plan.”