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

• Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy's dying wish?

  Change of Heart

• Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way.

  Handle with Care

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

  Between the Lines

• I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father,"she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?

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

• A very wise man once told me that you can't look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

  Salem Falls

• This is love, I think. A place where people who have been alone may lock together like hawks and spin in the air, dizzy with surprise at the connection. A place you go willingly, and with wonder

  Keeping Faith

• 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.

  Handle with Care

• When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires

  My Sister's Keeper

• 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.

  Plain Truth

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

  Change of Heart

• 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.

  Handle with Care

• if i'm going to fuck up my life, does it really matter which way i do it?.

  Salem Falls

• You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?

  My Sister's Keeper

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

  Lone Wolf

• The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do.

• well, sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.

  My Sister's Keeper

• It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?

  Handle with Care

• When I'm with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that's backing up.

  Vanishing Acts

• Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers, interrupt dinner.

  Perfect Match

• She shrugged. "You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.

  Plain Truth

• Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

  Vanishing Acts

• The thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart of a soul mate.

• This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.

  Between the Lines

• A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up.

  Handle with Care

• Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.

  Nineteen Minutes

• 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.

  Handle with Care

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

• 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.

  Handle with Care

• Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital... Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain.

  Lone Wolf

• Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max's hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It's a note I have never heard - this chord of pure pain - and it takes a moment to realize it is coming from me.

  Sing You Home

• Somewhere along the line, organized religion stopped being about faith, and started being about who had the power to keep the faith. You said that the purpose of religion was to bring people together. But does it, really? Or does it-knowingly, purposefully, and intentionally--break them apart?

  Change of Heart

• Dylan Jerome,"the lawyer admits, "wanted to sue God for not caring enough about him.

  My Sister's Keeper

• Dr. Keller begins pacing. "I don't think we've been hearing Faith just right. Her guard...the words..they sound alike."What do you mean?"Your daughter,"Dr. Keller says flatly. "I think she's seeing God.

  Keeping Faith

• Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.

  Lone Wolf

• I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.

  Lone Wolf