“I know what it's like when the things you believe make you feel like you're on the outside looking in.”

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

“You can feel people staring: it's like heat that rise from the pavement during summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don’t have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it’s about you. I use to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they are staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn’t tell. I mean, I was just me. Then one day. When I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did. That was the day I started to believe they might be right.jodi picoult”

“Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.”

“Let me tell you what you feel like when you know you are ready to die.You sleep a lot, and when you wake up the very first thought in your head is that you wish you could go back to bed.You go entire days without eating, because food is a commodity that keeps you here.You read the same page a hundred times.You rewind your life like a videocassette and see the things that make you weep, things that make you pause, but nothing that makes you want to play it forward.You forget to comb your hair, to shower, to dress.And then one day, when you make the decision that you have enough energy left in you to do this one, last, monumental thing, there comes a peace. Suddenly you are counting moments as you haven’t for months. Suddenly you have a secret that makes you smile, that makes people say you look wonderful, although you feel like a shell-brittle and capable of cracking into a thousand pieces. ”

“Be kind to others before you take care of yourself; make whoever you're with feel like they matter.”

“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.”