Authors — Quotes

Jodi Picoult Quotes: 86

You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.
My Sister's Keeper
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.
My Sister's Keeper
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?
Nineteen Minutes
Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.
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?
My Sister's Keeper
Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.
My Sister's Keeper
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.
Mercy
I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.
My Sister's Keeper
I, um, I have this problem. I broke up with my boyfriend, you see. And I'm pretty upset about it, so I wanted to talk to my best friend. [...] The thing is, they're both you.
The Pact
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.
I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.
My Sister's Keeper
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.
When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.
Handle with Care
My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.
When you love someone you let them take care of you.
A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.
Nineteen Minutes
The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies
Keeping Faith
I love you,"he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.
The Pact
Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.
Second Glance
Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.
My Sister's Keeper
I don't think we get a choice in who we fall for,"Ian whispers. "I think we just do.
Keeping Faith
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
My Sister's Keeper
So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.
Nineteen Minutes
How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?
Mercy
You know someone's right for you when the things they don't have to say are even more important than the things they do.
Sing You Home
People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.
Handle with Care
Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.
Keeping Faith
What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?
The Tenth Circle
There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.
Nineteen Minutes
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.
Handle with Care
Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.
Salem Falls
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.
Keeping Faith
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.
The Pact
There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations
Nineteen Minutes
He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable
My Sister's Keeper
Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far.
Sing You Home
Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person.
Nineteen Minutes
Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.
Perfect Match
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.
My Sister's Keeper
You don't have to say I love you to say I love you,"you said with a shrug. "All you have to do is say my name and I know."..."Can't you hear it?"you said. "When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.
If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?
Plain Truth
What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.
Handle with Care
Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.
Vanishing Acts
If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.
Nineteen Minutes
Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.
My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn't a social construct but an instinct.
Keeping Faith
If you're afraid of everyone leaving you, what do you do?"Make them stay."And if you can't do that, or don't know how to?"Ellie shrugged. "I don't know."Yes, you do. In fact, you've done it. You leave first,"Coop said, "so you don't have to watch them walk away.
Plain Truth
The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we're supposed to.
My Sister's Keeper
if you tell yourself you feel fine, you will.
My Sister's Keeper
Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?
Nineteen Minutes