Jodi Picoult

“There are skeletons in everyone's closet, things no one ever wants the world to discover.”

“I want to believe there's a God. Because I sure as hell know there's a devil.”

“...one half leaning in, one half pulling away.”

“Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.”

“Personally, I like books that make you think – books you’re still wondering about three days after you finish them; books you hand to a friend and say “Read this, so we can talk about it”. I suppose I’m just writing the kind of novel I like to read”

“I write because it’s a way of puzzling out answers to situations in the world that I don’t understand. The act of writing a book gives me the same experience that I hope reading it gives readers. It forces me to sort through the various points of view on a given issue or situation and ultimately come to a conclusion. Doing that might not change my mind, but it almost always gives me a stronger sense of why my opinion is what it is—a question we rarely ask ourselves.”

“Home is not a place, but rather, the people you love”

“Saying goodbye to the people you love isn't easy”

“True love can break the most powerful curse”

“Once you call something a story, it's set in stone. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that can't be transformed, because by definition, if you do that, it's not the same story anymore”

“I've been an idiot to think that real life could have a happy ending”

“Men don't traipse. We... Swagger”

“Your hand fits mine like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle”

“We fall back into silence. I look around XO Cafe and notice that chatter happens mostly at tables where the diners are young and hip. The older couples, the ones sporting wedding bands that wink with their silverware, eat without the pepper of conversation. Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?”

“Water never stops moving. Rain falls, and runs down a mountain into a river. The river finds its way to the ocean. It evaporates, like a soul, into the clouds. And then, like everything else, it starts all over again.”

“Honey, Kate is not going to die sooner because you have one more glass of mine, or because you stay overnight in a hotel, or because you let yourself crack up at a bad joke. So sit your ass back down and turn up the volume and act like you're a normal person.”

“It's the way he gets noticed, you know? I mean, imagine what it would be like if you were a squirrel living in the elephant cage at the zoo. Does anyone ever go there and say, Hey check out that squirrel? No, because there's something so much bigger you notice first.”

“He's too busy living to talk about dying. -Cara”

“She is quiet for a moment. "have you ever been swimming in the summer", she asks, "when a cloud comes in front of the sun? You know how, for a few seconds, you're absolutely freezing in th water and you think you'd better get out and dry off? But then all of a sudden the sun's back out and you're warm again and when you tell people how much fun you had swimming you wouldn't even think to mention those clouds." Cara shrugs. "That's what it's like, with my father." -Cara”

“Leave it to a man to mess things up”

“Here's what no one ever tells you about love: it hurts, having your heart broken”

“It takes two people to make a friendship work”

“I think her flaws make me love her even more. She's not perfect, but she's perfect to me”

“I think that when you live in a world with limits... when you've met everyone and seem everything you're going to see - you lose the hope that something extraordinary will happen in your life”

“Love makes life a little brighter”

“How do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she's stopped believing the impossible can happen?”

“Princes don't come around everyday, and happy endings don't grow on trees”

“When she wanted to escape her life, she read books”

“Sometimes the key to happiness is just expecting a little bit less”

“What if instead of focusing on what you don't have, you concentrate on what you've got?”

“That's what love is. It's some power greater than you and me, that draws us to one special person”

“Being a teenager isn't all that different from being part of someone else's story. There's always someone who thinks they know better than you do”

“I only just found you, I can't lose you now”

“Did you ever think that maybe what you see isn't really what's true?”

“How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?”

“At that moment, Oliver realized that home is not a place, but rather, the people who love you.”

“Marina sighs. “Love is like a tidal wave,” she says. “Because it sweeps you off your feet?” I ask. “No, because it sucks you under and you drown.” “But sometimes,” I point out, “it’s the only thing that keeps you afloat.”

“It's not because I don't want to hurt Delia's feelings. It's because when she is bruised, I'm the one who aches.”

“...the arms of his swim team sweatshirt still wrapped around the pillow on the bed - Em had said it smelled of him.”

“She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life.”

“I can't do this to you,' he said, drawing back. Emily put her hand on his and pulled the gun to her temple. 'Then do it for me,' she said.”

“I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live”

“You know, Michael, I used to sit around looking for a way to make sense of what happened, like there was some kind of answer I could find if I just looked hard enough. Then one day I realized that if there had been one, Dave would still be here. And I wondered if this...this feeling that I couldn't figure it all out...was what Dave had been feeling, too.”

“simply-quotes Follow I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.”

“[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.”“Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events.“So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.” “Huh?” I say.”

“I sigh. “But if you’d talked to Jules—if she could hear you . . .” My voice trails off.“Then you wouldn’t feel quite so crazy?” Oliver asks gently. “Can’t you believe in me, if I believe in you?”

“You keep distracting me,” I tell her.“All I’m doing is sitting here talking to you!”“Exactly,” I say, and I smile at her.j”

“Is it really worth dying for the person you love?”[Maureen] thinks about this for a moment. “That’s not the real question, Oliver. What you should be asking is, Can you live without her?”

“When you love someone, you don't see parts of him you don't like.”

“People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.”