Jodi Picoult

“If someone else takes a bite of my food, I have to cut off the part that his/her saliva has touched before I can eat any more of it.”

“Just 'cause you can't see me don't mean I gone away.”

“God, don't they teach you how to spell these days?""No," I answer. "They teach us to use spell-check.”

“You always knew after shitty things happened, who your friends really were.”

“This sort of obsessing would get him nowhere. He needed to move on, to get going, to look forward.”

“What could it be like to find out, in a matter of minutes, that the person you believed the sun rose and set on was not the person you'd thought?”

“I love you"..."But I made you cry.”

“The wine- it made her limbs loose and liquid, made her feel that a hummingbird had taken the place of her heart.”

“Or in other words: There are no fairy tales in the wild, no Cinderella stories. The lowly wolf that seems to rise to the top of the pack was really an alpha all along.”

“In other words, what looks like cruel and heartless from one angle might, from another, actually be the only way to protect your family. -Lucas”

“We'd sit with a big bowl of popcorn, wrapped together in a queen-size blanket, and would escape to a place where magic was ours for the taking, where men rescued the people they loved instead of abandoning them. A place where, no matter how bad things looked at that moment, there would always be a happy ending.”

“No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.”

“I've never been in love, but I've always imagined it--weirdly--like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. "Love," the host will say, "makes life a little brighter.”

“Her voice sounded like a string that was fraying.”

“Everyone deserves a happy ending.”

“When you die, you don't get to catch snowflakes on your tongue. You don't get to breathe winter in, deep in your lungs. You can't lie in bed and watch for the lights of the passing town plow. You can't suck on an icicle until your forehead hurts.”

“Trixie seesawed between wishing everyone would leave her alone and wondering why everyone treated her like a leper.”

“I know the first person I kissed won't be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.”

“A lifetime of hurt in one act of vengeance.”

“What makes a treasure a treasure." Marine replied, "is how rare a find it is, when you need it the most.”

“May I ask you something?" I say. "Why do you read books, when you could be outside, living a million different adventures every day?" "Because you can always count on a book to stay the same. EVerything else changes when you least expect it," she replies, bitter. "Families split apart, and nothing's forever. In books, you always know what's coming next. There are no surprises.”

“I've always been able to see you," I say. "It's a rather lovely view.”

“You get through it, you just never get over it”

“I kept hoping, silently, that you would want to save her like you hadn't been able to save yourself.”

“Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.”

“Hers were the pale gray that made you think of nightfall and silver bullets and the edge of winter. The color that filled the sky before it was torn in half by lightening.”

“You know, if you monitored the humidity a little better in here, you might reduce the irritants.''I assume you're referring to the mites, and not the lawyers.”

“...I stopped trying to figure out American juries around the same time Adam Sandler movies started raking in millions at the box office--people just don't act predictably.”

“If you knew what those [pork rinds] did to your body, you wouldn't eat them.''If you knew when the last time I ate was, you wouldn't bother me.”

“We [the Amish] look alike. We pray alike. We live alike. ...But none of these things mean we all think alike.”

“a story will tell itself, when it’s ready”

“As a kid, his favorite toy had been a snow globe, that held a small town of gingerbread buildings and peppermint streets. He’d wanted so badly to live there that one day he’d smashed the glass ball - only to find out that the houses were made of plaster, the candy stripes painted on.”

“When you love someone, there’s a pattern to the way you come together. You might not even realize it, but your bodies are choreographed: a touch on the hip, a stroke of the hair. A staccato kiss, break away, a longer one. It’s a routine, but not in the boring sense of the word. It’s just the way you’ve learned to fit.”

“His grandmother had taught him that there was no such thing as coincidence. There are millions of people in this world, she had told him, and the spirits will see that most of them, you never have to meet. But there are one or two that you are tied to, and spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right.”

“The strange thing; her face, after she hit me. She was in greater pain than I. You could see it in her eyes - like she had been violated in some way that broke her own image.”

“When I was little, the great mystery to me was not how babies were made, but why?”

“you cannot take something i trust you with and use it against me-- plain truth”

“The problem was , you never heard anyone say,"wow, check out the brain on that babe.”

“I might never be a cover girl, but I was a girl who could cover it all.”

“The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe,it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.More amazing is how even though that's become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.”

“You can stay up all night and still not count all the ways to lose the people you love.”

“Fuck them all. I ought to have that tattooed on my forehead, for all the times I've thought it.”

“But risk always looks different when you are beating he system than when you've been beaten”

“They don't like the thought of someone else making demands on the person whom they see as belonging entirely to them.”

“There was, really, nothing you could use as a blueprint for your life, except your past. There was no starting over. There was only picking up the pieces someone had left behind.”

“You figured that the only way I'd be happy is if I did the things you thought would be best for me.”

“if you were quiet and blended into the background, you were less likely to make waves”

“It still hurts," she whispered. "Even when you're doing it for someone else, that doesn't stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.”

“Suffering so someone else didn't have to suffer. Sacrificing your body for someone else's well being.”

“because in the past words have only driven them apart.”