Jodi Picoult

“I loved Alex so much that it was easier to let him hurt me than to watch him hurt himself.”

“Antony was also obsessive, judgmental, and paranoid.”

“the image of those widmestern storms that rip up the world as you know it, and leave, like a sacrifice, a rainbow to make you forget what has come before.”

“they accepted any baggage that came with you and made you believe you were more than you actually were”

“someone who could love so hard and so well could also hate, and hurt, as deeply”

“I could think whatever I wanted to, but realized that any promises I made myself were destined to be broken.”

“The only thing they'll let you shoot with a camera.”

“males conspicuously leaving their mark to let others know where they weren't welcome.”

“The truth is, I don't want to be disappointed again. Not by someone else's shortcomings, and especially not by my own.”

“The problem," he said, "with being one of the best is that you still have to get better. But you're competing with yourself.”

“In the past, even Alex's promises hadn't prevented a reoccurence. She didn't have a choice. She wished he could see that as clearly as she did.”

“You don't rough them up.”

“You don't borrow trouble.”

“So much time is spent with people superficially. You remember all the fun you had but nothing specific.”

“So you're not even going to try? You're just going to assume that the answer's no?”

“I couldn't hear his voice over the hammer of my heart. And I told myself over and over I should have known that someone who could love so hard and so well could also hate, and hurt, as deeply.”

“I meant I like feeling you're mine.”

“Because we're two of a kind. You were made to take care of me, and I'm going to take care of you.”

“It was hard to separate the fact from the fiction...”

“But I wouldn't get him close, and I would never show him my heart.”

“Joseph Obomsawin, the elder I lived with there, says that those who turn to animals do so because humans have let them down.”

“Recollections are in the eye of the beholder. No two held side by side can ever quite match.”

“Believe me, Being gay is not a choice. Noone would choose to make life harder than it has to be.”

“You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.”

“Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.”

“The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.”

“Writing is successful schizophrenia because I’m paid to hear voices in my head.”

“I didn't know why it's called "getting lost". even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turns to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected”

“After sticking out life, I hope it's whatever you want it to be.”

“You want to do something about it - take action, scream at them, tell them they're idiots - but you can't. Being on the fringe is the most disempowering feeling. You get so used to the world being a certain way, there seems to be no escape from it.”

“An apology with a defense built in isn't much of an apology”

“You don't make a friend," Jacob said with a scowl. "It's not like they come with directions like you'd find on a box of macaroni and cheese.”

“I think there are crossroads in our lives when we make grand, sweeping decisions without even realizing it.”

“If all I could ever have is you, I'd be a billionaire.”

“You could have been Bethany Matthews, Delia Hopkins, Cleopatra - it wouldn't matter. And if you'd grown up with a thousand lemon trees in the middle of the desert, with a cactus instead of a Christmas tree and a pet armadillo, well then, I would have gone to law school at Arizona State, I guess. I would have defended illegal aliens crossing the border. But we still would have wound up together, Dee. No matter what kind of life I had, you'd be at the end of it.”

“When she had packed all the artifacts that made up their personal history into liquor store boxes, the house became strictly a feminine place. She stood with her hands on her hips, stoically accepting the absence of old Boston Celtics coasters and the tangle of fishing poles, the old dartboard from a Scots pub, the toolbox and downhill skis, the silky patterned ties which sat in the base of one box like a writing mass of snakes. Without these things, one tended to notice the bright eyelet curtains, the vase filled with yawning crocuses, a needlepoint pillow ... Overall, the house looked much like her apartment had eight years ago, before she had met him.”

“Why is it that only in the very beginnings of a relationship are you aware of the heat coming from inside a person, of the number of inches you would have to move for your shoulders to brush as if it were an accident?”

“I was surprised that Kurt seemed to understand that you might never love someone as hard as you had the first time you'd fallen; I was even more surprised to learn that maybe you could.”

“In a minute - Sometime soon - Maybe next time - Make it June Until later Doesnt always come”

“. . .we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night- because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than the law.”

“There are two reasons not to tell the truth--becuase lying will get you what you want, and because lying will keep someone from getting hurt.”

“You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.”

“Wenn jemand starb, dem du dein Herz geschenkt hattest, nahm er es dann mit?”

“Maybe this was the job of a mother: to buy time for her child, no matter what. Even if it meant doing something she'd rather not; even if it left her flat on her back.”

“A woman isn't all that different from a bonfire. A fire's a beautiful thing, right? Something you can't take your eyes off, when it's burning. If you can keep it contained, it'll throw light and heat for you. It's only when it gets out of control that you have to go on the offensive.”

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

“She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess.”

“Music is the language of memory”

“I imagine how cool it would be if all small talk wasn't lies.”

“People always want to know what it feels like, so I’ll tell you: there’s a sting when you first slice, and then your heart speeds up when you see the blood, because you know you’ve done something you shouldn’t have, and yet you’ve gotten away with it. Then you sort of go into a trance, because it’s truly dazzling—that bright red line, like a highway route on a map that you want to follow to see where it leads. And—God—the sweet release, that’s the best way I can describe it, kind of like a balloon that’s tied to a little kid’s hand, which somehow breaks free and floats into the sky. You just know that balloon is thinking, Ha, I don’t belong to you after all; and at the same time, Do they have any idea how beautiful the view is from up here? And then the balloon remembers, after the fact, that it has a wicked fear of heights.When reality kicks in, you grab some toilet paper or a paper towel (better than a washcloth, because the stains don’t ever come out 100 percent) and you press hard against the cut. You can feel your embarrassment; it’s a backbeat underneath your pulse. Whatever relief there was a minute ago congeals, like cold gravy, into a fist in the pit of your stomach. You literally make yourself sick, because you promised yourself last time would be the last time, and once again, you’ve let yourself down. So you hide the evidence of your weakness under layers of clothes long enough to cover the cuts, even if it’s summertime and no one is wearing jeans or long sleeves. You throw the bloody tissues into the toilet and watch the water go pink before you flush them into oblivion, and you wish it were really that easy.”