Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? —REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

— Jodi Picoult

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.

— Jodi Picoult

If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.

— Jodi Picoult

Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

— Jodi Picoult

But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

— Jodi Picoult

There are five things we need to say to people we love before they die…: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye.

— Jodi Picoult

You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.

— Jodi Picoult

Well, you have to be near death to understand why life matters, otherwise, you don't have the perspective. You believe you have the time to put off that phone call you haven't made to your mother. You let an old argument fester. You fold down the page in a travel magazine and tell yourself one day, you'll get to Istanbul or Santorini or back to the town where you were born. You have the luxury of time, until you don't- and then it becomes clear what's most important.

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

And if you don't find what you're looking for?"

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.

— Jodi Picoult

Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.

— Jodi Picoult

But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone's expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.

— Jodi Picoult

I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

— Jodi Picoult

When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.

— Jodi Picoult

The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.

— Jodi Picoult

And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

— Jodi Picoult

What would you do if you only had one day left in this world? Spend it with the people you love? Travel to the far corners of the earth to see as many wonders as possible? Eat nothing but chocolate? Would you apologize for all your mistakes? Would you stand up to those you'd never had the courage to face? Would you tell your secret crush that you loved him or her? Why is it that we wait till the last minute to do the things we should be doing all along?

— Jodi Picoult

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?

— Jodi Picoult

Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.

— Jodi Picoult

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?

— Jodi Picoult

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? —REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR

— Jodi Picoult

There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.

— Jodi Picoult

If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.

— Jodi Picoult

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.

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

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?

— Jodi Picoult

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.

— Jodi Picoult

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

— Jodi Picoult

What if it turns out that a life isn't defined by who you belong to, or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you've lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next?

— Jodi Picoult

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?

— Jodi Picoult

Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, … It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

— Jodi Picoult

I woke up one morning thinking about wolves and realized that wolf packs function as families. Everyone has a role, and if you act within the parameters of your role, the whole pack succeeds, and when that falls apart, so does the pack.

— Jodi Picoult

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

When it rains," her father said "it pours.

— Jodi Picoult

A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.

— Jodi Picoult

What you know isn't nearly as important as who you know. Who will miss you. Who you will miss.

— Jodi Picoult

Since when does anyone get the option to do the easiest?

— Jodi Picoult

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. 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.

— Jodi Picoult

Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.

— Jodi Picoult

A good leg will fall. A straight back will stoop. A black beard will turn white. A curled pate will grow bald." He held out a small triangle of fruit toward Emilia. "But a good heart, my dear... well, a good heart is the sun and the moon.

— Jodi Picoult

Small Great Things is a reference to a quote often attributed to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

— Jodi Picoult

I woke up one morning thinking about wolves and realized that wolf packs function as families. Everyone has a role, and if you act within the parameters of your role, the whole pack succeeds, and when that falls apart, so does the pack.

— Jodi Picoult

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.

— Jodi Picoult

Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.

— Jodi Picoult

I woke up one morning thinking about wolves and realized that wolf packs function as families. Everyone has a role, and if you act within the parameters of your role, the whole pack succeeds, and when that falls apart, so does the pack.

— Jodi Picoult

We all have stories we tell ourselves, until we believe them to be true.

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead.

— Jodi Picoult

No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.

— Jodi Picoult