Jodi Picoult famous quotes

The only person who suffers, when you squirrel alway all that hate, is you.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Hate #Squirrels #Suffering

I think people do things all the time in the name of love that they shouldn't be doing - such is the nature of us.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Thinking #Names #People

Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Heart #Promise #Together

Life can change in an instant; don't be so worried about the future that you forget to celebrate what you have right now.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Forget #Worried #Celebrate

You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Moving On #Past #Looks

Sometimes when you find something you didn't really realize you were looking for, you just don't know how to react.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Sometimes #Realizing

There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Inspirational #Recovery #Dark

There are certain things that I'll hear about and that I think will make a great book and I put it in a file. Sometimes it's a situation that interests me, and I don't even realize what I'm trying to say about it until I get closer to it. Sometimes the book after that I've written 125 pages of, and I can tell you what the book is after that. I just sort of have a linear progression, but more than anything, the topics land in your lap. I don't feel that I go out searching for them.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Book #Thinking #Land

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

#Fall #Eggs #Height

I can get 400 pages down the road and still not know the answer. What I do know is that I have really examined every facet of the situation, and I may not have changed my opinion but I have definitely forced myself to explore why it's my opinion.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Answers #May #Pages

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Memories #Language #Music Is

I don't want to tell people what to think. I'm the least qualified person in the world for that. If I'd go around pretending to be the expert on everything, I'd become Dan Brown, and I don't understand that. We all do our research if we're good writers, and we all work hard to get it right, but that doesn't mean we're experts in the field. The best we can do is challenge people to learn the facts themselves.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Hard Work #Mean #Thinking

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.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Life #Heartbreak #Heartbroken

The human capacity for burden is like bamboo- far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Believe #Firsts #Bamboo

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.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Mistake #Perfect #Different

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.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Love #Beautiful #Mom

This is what I like about photographs. They're proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Perfect #Heartbeat #Photograph

Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Inspirational #Lessons #Taught

Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Silence #Sound #Sitting

No matter what Joe Hoffman and Wade Preston say, it's not gender that makes a family; it's love. You don't need a mother and a father; you don't necessarily even need two parents. You just need someone who's got your back.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Mother #Father #Love You

You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Mistake #Eye #Path

When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn't.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Motivational #Confidence #Self Esteem

Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or – in this case – feared might come to pass passed by instead.
-- Jodi Picoult

#What If #Might #Cases

I am Alice in Wonderland', Josie thought. 'Watch me fall.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Fall #Watches #Wonderland

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

#Love #Romantic #Heart

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

#Inspirational #Life #Disappointment

To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a set of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Children #Loss #Keys

When you love someone you let them take care of you.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Love #When You Love Someone #Care

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.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Children #Pregnancy #Motherhood

Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's beause it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone's ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end. But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Games #Long #Want

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

#Eye #Religion #Sometimes

But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?
-- Jodi Picoult

#Missing #Doe #Answers

You know what the difference is between a dream and a goal?... A plan.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Motivational #Dream #Differences

When you are attracted to people, it's because of the details. Their kindness. Their eyes. The fact that they can get you to laugh when you need it the most.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Kindness #Eye #People

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

#Time #Grief #School

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Mother #Children #School

There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Happiness #Reality #Two

Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Horse #Coffee #Heart

Beliefs are the roads we take to our dreams. Believe you can do something-or believe you can't-and you'll be right everytime.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Dream #Believe #Belief

Sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Want #Sometimes #What You Want

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

#Doubt #Battle #Weapons

I believed the reason there was a God was to prevent such atrocities from happening to the same person twice. But nothing prepared me for this: I have done what I've sworn I could never do; I have become my own nightmare... I have lost control.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Atrocities #Done #Nightmare

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
-- Jodi Picoult

#Inspirational #First Love #Years

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Sad #Children #Parent

Life sometimes gets so bogged down in the details, you forget you are living it. There is always another appointment to be met, another bill to pay, another symptom presenting, another uneventful day to be notched onto the wooden wall. We have synchronized our watches, studied our calendars, existed in minutes, and completely forgotten to step back and see what we've accomplished.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Life #Wall #Calendars

People work too hard to figure out the meaning of their lives. Why me, why now. The truth is, sometimes things don't happen to you for a reason. Sometimes it's just about being in the right place at the right time for someone else.
-- Jodi Picoult

#People #Why Me #Sometimes

Relationships always sounded so physically painful: you fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars?
-- Jodi Picoult

#Love You #Heart #People

I have always envied people who believe strongly in religion, people who could face a tragedy by praying and know that it would be all right. As unscientific as it seems, well, it would be nice to lay the responsibilities and pain on someone else's larger shoulders.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Pain #Nice #Believe

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

#Life #Rich #Wanted

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

#Life #Change #Ends

You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it's a catch-22: all of those things you're willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you've lost yourself.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Order #Would Be #Want

Parents aren’t the people you come from. They’re the people you want to be, when you grow up.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Growing Up #People #Parent

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
-- Jodi Picoult

#Love #Thinking #Air

When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point taht wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Dog #Eye #Heart

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

#Expectations #Might #Honest

Happiness is what you choose to remember.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Remember #You Choose

Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?
-- Jodi Picoult

#Hate #Done #Stills

They're fake bullets, so why do I feel like Im bleeding out?
-- Jodi Picoult

#Fake #Bullets #Bleeding

We all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn’t have any.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Clouds #Sky #Interesting

Ross believed in past lives. Moreover, he believed that the person you fell in love with in each life was the same person you fell in love with in the life before, and the one before that. Sometimes, you might miss her - she'd be reborn in post-World War I generation, and you wouldn't come back until the fifties. Sometimes, your paths would cross and you wouldn't recognize each other. Get it right - that is: fall madly, truly, deeply - and perhaps there'd be an eternity carved out solely for the two of you.
-- Jodi Picoult

#War #Fall #Past

I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Dream #Fall #End Of The World

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Lying #Heart #Thinking

Here's a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we'd rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman who's soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Girl #Women #Home

My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Regret #Dad #Car

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.
-- Jodi Picoult

I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Baby #Children #Dust

Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Fear #Answers #Noticing

Just because you didn't put a name to something did not mean it wasn't there.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Mean #Names

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?
-- Jodi Picoult

#Loss #Different #Dialect

Polar north can't get away from a magnet; the magnet finds it, no matter what.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Matter #Get Away #Magnet

I think you can love a person too much. You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Running #Fall #Eye

I know what it's like to start something and have it suddenly grow out of control. And you want to get rid of it, because it's hurting you and everyone else around you, but every time you try to do that, it consumes you again.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Hurt #Trying #Want

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

#Want #Behavior #Worst

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Order #Missing #Beloved

When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Revenge #Journey #Two

What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?
-- Jodi Picoult

#Forgiving #Able #Never Forget

parenting isn't a noun but a verb--an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Jobs #Years #Curves

Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Mom #Mother #Real

I know what love is. When you find the person you are supposed to love, bells ring and fireworks go off in your head and you can't find the words to speak and you think about him all the time. When you find the person you are supposed to love, you will know by staring deeply into their eyes.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Love You #Eye #Thinking

Infatuation's just another word for not seeing clearly. When you start to love a person- that's when they become real
-- Jodi Picoult

#Real #Infatuation #Persons

I don't know what he means by that, but I nod and smile at him. You'd be surprised at how far that response can get you in a conversation where you are completely confused.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Confused #Mean #Where You Are

The best place to cry is on a mother's arms.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Mom #Mother #Arms

A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it...You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Tolerance #Enough #Live And Let Live

maybe there is more to a person than a body and a mind. maybe something else figures into the mix— not a soul, exactly, but a spirit that hints you might one day be greater, stronger than you are now. a promise; a potential.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Soul #Promise #Mind

Some women are meant to change the world, while others are meant to hold it together. And then there are those of us who simply don't want to be in it, because we know no matter how much we struggle, we can't comfortably fit.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Women #Struggle #Together

I'm telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they'd conclude that most people had children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn't one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren't very flattering.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Baby #Children #Night

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Mother #Children #Growing Up

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?
-- Jodi Picoult

#Mother #Father #Love You

if you tell yourself you feel fine, you will.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Positive #Thinking #Fine

the letters are mixed up. U and I should be together.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Together #Letters #Should

Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Ignorance #Trying #Sometimes

You build a wall to keep something unwanted out … or to hold something precious in.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Life #Wall #Unwanted

You can touch everything and be connected to nothing.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Connected

It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place--because we become better people in it.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Inspirational #Kindness #People

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

#Empty #Spokes #Okay

Raw love, like raw heartache, could blindside you.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Heartache

On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger's. Like me, they're very smart. And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Smart #Cat #Thinking

All I know is that I carried you for nine months. I fed you, I clothed you, I paid for your college education. Friending me on Facebook seems like a small thing to ask in return.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Mom And Daughter #College #Nine

Someone real," I hear myself saying. "Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who's smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a symphony and start to cry, because he understands music can be too big for words. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone I want to talk to first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Someone I feel like I've known my whole life, even if I haven't.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Relationship #Morning #Real

It's never the differences between people that suprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.
-- Jodi Picoult

#Odds #Differences #People