Jodi Picoult - Life Quotes

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She stares at me for a moment, and then she bursts out laughing. You haven't seen his perfect little wife and his perfect little girls. Believe me, Oliver, I'm not the great love of his life, the one he'll never forget. You are to me, I say.

Jodi Picoult
I was starting to see that 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.

Jodi Picoult
How do you walk into someone's life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.

Jodi Picoult
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
Those eyes, they've got a history with mine. They were the first things I saw when I came to, after being hit in the skull with a baseball thrown by Patrick at Little League. They were the fortification I needed at sixteen to ride the chairlift at Sugarloaf, although I am terrified of heights. For almost my whole life, they've told me I'm doing all right, during moments when it was not in my own power to answer.

Jodi Picoult
It just goes to show you: you can put nine insane miles between you and another person. You can make a vow to never speak his name. You can surgically remove someone from your life. And still, he'll haunt you.

Jodi Picoult
I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.

Jodi Picoult
Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

Jodi Picoult
All it takes is a second and your whole life can get turned upside down.

Jodi Picoult
I've been an idiot to think that real life could have a happy ending

Jodi Picoult
Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

Jodi Picoult
These days her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn't anymore.

Jodi Picoult
Can you imagine what it would be like to know that your life was just going to be a series of days that were all the same, that were do-overs?

Jodi Picoult
A man should live his life a certain way not because of some divine authority, but because of a personal moral obligation to himself and others.

Jodi Picoult
Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.

Jodi Picoult
Just when you think you've got your life by the reins, that's when it's most likely to run away with you.

Jodi Picoult
But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? Whats stronger- the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Jodi Picoult
I think that when you live in a world with limits... when you've met everyone and seem everything you're going to see - you lose the hope that something extraordinary will happen in your life

Jodi Picoult
If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been-what would you take?

Jodi Picoult
But what if your obsession has nothing to do with drugs or thrills or money? What if what you want most in the world is to recapture the way life was a week, a month, a year ago-and you are willing to do whatever it takes?

Jodi Picoult
It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.

Jodi Picoult
What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

Jodi Picoult