Jodi Picoult Quotes

After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken.

I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.

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.

As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.

Jessie’s breathing evens against me, like it used to when he was so small, when I used to carry him upstairs after he’d fallen asleep in my lap. He used to hit me over and over with questions:
What’s a two-inch hose for; a one-inch? How come you wash the engines? Does the can man ever et to drive? I realize that I cannot remember exactly when he stopped asking. But I do remember feeling as if something had gone missing, as if the loss of a kid’s hero worship canache like a phantom limb.

You might have to lose control before you could find out what you'd been missing.

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.

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

What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.

Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you’d let them go. But now I look at you, and I dreamed about Maggie, and I see that I’ve been wrong. If you really love someone, Allie, I think you have to take them back.

Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it.

Anna is the only proof I have that I was born into this family. Instead of dropped off on the doorstep by some Bonnie and Clyde couple that ran off into the night. On the surface, we’re polar opposites. Under the skin, though, we’re the same: people think they know what they’re getting, and they are always wrong.

Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.

Did everyone in jail think they were innocent? All this time Peter had spent lying on the bench, convincing himself that he was nothing like anyone else in the Grafton County Jail—and as it turned out, that was a lie.

When we're awake, we see what we need to see. When we're asleep, we see what is really there.