Jodi Picoult Quotes

666 Sourced Quotes

It was a catch-22: If you didn't put the trauma behind you, you couldn't move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

Jodi Picoult
I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them. Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.

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

Jodi Picoult
The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.

Jodi Picoult
Religion isn't in your DNA. you don't believe just because your parents believe.

Jodi Picoult
Here I am, wasting away inside a book I wish I could escape, and all she wants to do is stay in the story. If I could talk to this girl Delilah, I'd ask her why on earth she would ever trade a single second of the world she's in for the one in which I'm stuck

Jodi Picoult
On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive - the sum of the parts equal more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.

Jodi Picoult
She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.

Jodi Picoult
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
What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too.

Jodi Picoult
That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

Jodi Picoult
Because hate's just the flip side of love. Like heads and tails on a dime. If you don't know what it feels like to love someone, how would you know what hate is? One can't exist without the other.

Jodi Picoult
The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.

Jodi Picoult
There's no way to convince her that just because you put half. planet between you and someone else, you can't drive that person out of your thoughts. Believe me. I've tried.

Jodi Picoult
I don't believe in God. But sitting there, in a room full of those who feel otherwise, I realize that I do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds, I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for — even if it's just a better tomorrow — is the most powerful drug on this planet.

Jodi Picoult
A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch.

Jodi Picoult
How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?

Jodi Picoult
I imagined what it would be like to hold a butterfly in your hands something bejeweled and treasured and to know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees.

Jodi Picoult
I learned a long time ago with you that folks who were trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you've done your job - no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.

Jodi Picoult
He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat.

Jodi Picoult
My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.

Jodi Picoult
When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut.

Jodi Picoult
Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

Jodi Picoult
I realized it was like looking into the sun—you shouldn't do it, because you'd turn your face away and be blind to everything else.

Jodi Picoult
It was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.

Jodi Picoult
It was nice not having to be the one in control, for a little while. It was nice to be the one who was protected, instead of the one who'd been protecting eveyone else.

Jodi Picoult
Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids... but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life.

Jodi Picoult
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?

Jodi Picoult
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.

Jodi Picoult
Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on.

Jodi Picoult