Jodi Picoult Quotes

666 Sourced Quotes

I have a sister, so I know-that relationship, it's all about fairness: you want your sibling to have exactly what you have-the same amount of toys, the same number of meatballs on your spaghetti, the same share of love. But being a mother is completely different. You want your child to have more than you ever did. You want to build a fire underneath her and watch her soar. It's bigger than words.

Jodi Picoult
I know better than most people that a criminal isn't always a thug in a black leather jacket with a big brand on his forehead to warn us away. Criminals sit next to us on the bus. They pack our groceries and cash our paychecks for us and teach our children. They look no different from you or me. And that's why they get away with it.

Jodi Picoult
There was no easy switch that she could flip to stem the flow of feelings, no way to drain the memories that pooled like acid in her stomach because her heart no longer knew what to do with them.

Jodi Picoult
I smiled at him as best I could and pushed the paper across the table before he could change his mind. Because Henry DeVille was correct - there was an ingredient in my baking more concenctrated than any extract, more pungent than any spice; an ingredient that everyone would recognize and no one was able to name: it was regret, and it rose when one least expected.

Jodi Picoult
Sometimes we don't know we're dreaming; we can't even fathom that we're asleep.

Jodi Picoult
The optimist in me wants to believe sexuality will eventually become like handwriting: there's no right way and wrong way to do it. We're all just wired differently. It's also worth noting that when you meet someone, you never bother to ask if he's right or left-handed. After all: does it really matter to anyone other than the person holding the pen?

Jodi Picoult
I never said I do not remember, my grandmother corrects. I said I prefer to forget.

Jodi Picoult
Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

Jodi Picoult
There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.

Jodi Picoult
As anyone who's ever contracted it knows, lies are an infectious disease. They slip under the almond slivers of your fingernails and into your bloodstream.

Jodi Picoult
The world is a place where the extraordinary can sit just beside the ordinary with the thinnest of boundaries; that even in environments inhospitable to man, all sort of entities might thrive.

Jodi Picoult
It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.

Jodi Picoult
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?

Jodi Picoult
My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding my father's shoulders at twilight, when I knew that if I held up my hands and spread my fingers like a net, I could catch the coming stars.

Jodi Picoult
I leaned forward and kissed him. And again. As if I were passing him all those silent words I cound not say, the ones that explained my biggest secret: that I might not have OI but I knew how he (Adam) felt. That I was breaking apart, too, all the time."-Amelia

Jodi Picoult
The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatly wrapped lies.

Jodi Picoult
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.

Jodi Picoult
I'm not saying you did the wrong thing. I'm not even saying it wasn't something I'd thought of doing, myself. But even if it was the just thing to do, or the fitting thing, it still wasn't the right thing.

Jodi Picoult
People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.

Jodi Picoult
That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

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

Jodi Picoult
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.

Jodi Picoult
The problem was, you couldn't have one without the other. There couldn't be a bad guy unless there was a good guy to create the standard. And there couldn't be a good guy until a bad guy showed just how far off the path he might stray.

Jodi Picoult
Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

Jodi Picoult
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
Let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: it solidfies into something wlaw. not grief, like you'd expect, or even regret. no, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn't until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tounge that you realize this is angel in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measyred and spread.

Jodi Picoult
Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.

Jodi Picoult
It is so strange, to encounter an ex. It's as if you're in a foreign film, and what you're saying face-to-face has nothing to do with the subtitles flowing beneath you. We are so careful not to touch, although once upon a time, I slept plastered to him in our bed, like lichen on a rock. We are two strangers who knows every shameful secret, every hidden freckle, every fatal flaw in each other.

Jodi Picoult
Just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.

Jodi Picoult
The only difference between a wish and a prayer is that you're at the mercy of the universe for the first, and you've got some help with the second.

Jodi Picoult