Top 100 Jodi Picoult Quotes
#1. If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over- only living with the mistakes you've made.
Jodi Picoult
#2. Many people have a novel inside them, but most don't bother to get it out.
Jodi Picoult
#3. I also know that Edison believed the moment between being awake and being asleep was a veil, and it was in that moment that we were most connected to our higher selves.
Jodi Picoult
#4. True confession: The reason we don't talk about race is because we do not speak a common language.
Jodi Picoult
#5. When you die, you die. And everything is over.
Jodi Picoult
#6. Could you hate your son for what he had done, and still love him for who he had been? The
Jodi Picoult
#7. The problem was , you never heard anyone say,wow, check out the brain on that babe.
Jodi Picoult
#8. It feels like a punch. Tears fill my eyes, and I wonder how I could be upset over losing something I never had.
Jodi Picoult
#9. Admitting that racism has played a part in our success means admitting that the American dream isn't quite so accessible to all.
Jodi Picoult
#10. Retribution. In a way, by asking me to kill
Jodi Picoult
#11. And I thought - not for the first time - that forgiving and forgetting aren't mutually exclusive.
Jodi Picoult
#12. 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.
Jodi Picoult
#13. I can give or take elephants; I never can find the cheetah-but the zebras captivate me. They'd be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that's black or white.
Jodi Picoult
#14. Kate is going to die. It took me a long time to be able to say that. We all are going to die, when you get down to it, but it's not supposed to be like this. Kate ought to be the one saying goodbye to me.
Jodi Picoult
#15. 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
#16. For the risk of it, for the sheer surprise of pressing one's nose to the glass and finding someone staring back on the other side.
Jodi Picoult
#17. Antony was also obsessive, judgmental, and paranoid.
Jodi Picoult
#18. Torn between fear and something that resembled love, she wrestled with questions she never dreamed she would face: How could she leave? Then again, how could she stay?
Jodi Picoult
#19. When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.
Jodi Picoult
#20. Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write.
Jodi Picoult
#21. There are always sides. There is always a winner and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.
Jodi Picoult
#22. It's amazing what you can convince yourself of, if you buy into the lie.
Jodi Picoult
#23. You make yourself strong because it's expected of you. You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be.
Jodi Picoult
#24. But not all Jews were victims- look at Chairman Rumkowski, who sat safe with his new wife in his cushy home making lists, with the blood of my family on his hands. And not all Germans were murderers. Look at Herr Fassbinder, who had saved so many children on the night that children were taken away.
Jodi Picoult
#25. There was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher.
Jodi Picoult
#26. When we sat down on the couch again, you curled up against my side, like you used to when you were a toddler.
What I wanted to say to you, but didn't, was this: Don't use me as your model. I'm the last person you should look up to.
Jodi Picoult
#27. If you say that you believe something to be true, you might mean one of two things- that you're still weighing the alternatives, or that you accept it as a fact.
Jodi Picoult
#28. If someone else takes a bite of my food, I have to cut off the part that his/her saliva has touched before I can eat any more of it.
Jodi Picoult
#29. If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.
Jodi Picoult
#30. And sometimes, he was less lucid. He'd run around his cell like a caged animal; he'd rock back and forth; he'd swing from topic to topic as if it was the only way to cross the jungle of his thoughts.
Jodi Picoult
#31. She was the only one for whom the house didn't have to be cleaned, for whom she didn't have to wear her makeup, and around whom she could say anything without fear of repercussions, or of looking truly stupid.
Jodi Picoult
#32. Sometimes the hardest thing to hear is the truth.
Jodi Picoult
#33. There is no greater force on earth than a mother's revenge
Jodi Picoult
#34. What he did was wrong. He doesn't deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it's choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you.
Jodi Picoult
#35. He is dark and quiet and completely different from me, which is exactly why I should put distance between us. But it is also the reason I find him so fascinating.
Jodi Picoult
#36. I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.
Jodi Picoult
#37. Sometimes, all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.
Jodi Picoult
#38. If, even after you make what everyone considers to be the biggest mistake of your life, you stop thinking it's a mistake and may be see it as the best thing that ever could have happened.
Jodi Picoult
#39. True, I'd never met him. And true, he was a fictional character. But he also was what people needed him to be: a dashing hero, and articulate peacemaker, a cunning excape artist.
Jodi Picoult
#40. In the real world, you can't just turn a page and feel better.
Jodi Picoult
#41. I don't base my books on my life (thank goodness) and I don't pick the topic first. In fact, the topic picks me - via a question I can't answer as a mom, a wife, a woman, an American. I find myself wondering "What if ... " and it blossoms into a whole novel.
Jodi Picoult
#42. Since it had gotten so quiet in the room that you could hear the sound of your own doubts ...
Jodi Picoult
#43. I would tell them that when you look at a person, you never know what the're hiding.
Jodi Picoult
#44. 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
#45. As a prosecutor, you've got the burden of proof. As a defense lawyer, all you have to do is introduce a tiny doubt.
Jodi Picoult
#46. They both knew that jealousy could rise like a tide, erasing events that had been scratched into the shore of your memory.
Jodi Picoult
#47. You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.
Jodi Picoult
#48. Risk always looks different when you're beating the system than when you've been beaten.
Jodi Picoult
#49. Isn't it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?
Jodi Picoult
#50. Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.
Jodi Picoult
#51. Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn't even any guilt.
Jodi Picoult
#52. But if you are going to say you are unnerved by how Turk Bauer is filled with hate, you must admit that Ruth, too, is filled with hate. You heard it,
Jodi Picoult
#53. Slavery isn't Black history," I point out. "It's everyone's history." A
Jodi Picoult
#54. Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole.
Jodi Picoult
#55. His biggest fear was that if and when he did find his missing daughter, she would no longer recognize who he had become in order to save her.
Jodi Picoult
#56. ...when you loved someone, you didn't want to be the one who brought their world crashing down.
Jodi Picoult
#57. I consider myself spiritual and I'm married to a man who is both an atheist and a humanist, and my kids have been raised with the traditions of different religions, but they do not go to church or temple. My feeling is that everyone should be able to believe what they want or need to believe.
Jodi Picoult
#58. I want to believe there's a God. Because I sure as hell know there's a devil.
Jodi Picoult
#59. Just so you know, when they say "Once upon
a time" ... they're lying
Jodi Picoult
#60. Daniel understood that in the blink of an eye you might reinvent yourself. He understood that the person you were yesterday might not be the person you are tomorrow.
Jodi Picoult
#61. I had not asked to be rescued, true, but that did not mean I didn't need saving.
Jodi Picoult
#62. I used to hope that if we had to give up our old life, we'd get a new one.
Jodi Picoult
#63. I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?
Jodi Picoult
#64. Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?
Jodi Picoult
#65. If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.
Jodi Picoult
#66. Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.
Jodi Picoult
#67. It's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you.
Jodi Picoult
#68. Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up
Jodi Picoult
#69. 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
#70. Maybe the reason I've never died in this story is that I've never had something worth dying for before.
Jodi Picoult
#71. We sit for a few more moments, although there's really nothing left to say. This is new to me, too, an entire conversation that takes place in silence, because the heart has its own language. I will remember what Eric says even though he doesn't say a word. I will tell it to her.
Jodi Picoult
#72. Certainly I know better than most that circumstances can turn you into someone you've never been before.
Jodi Picoult
#74. And he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.
Jodi Picoult
#75. I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room - but eventually, you learn to live with it.
Jodi Picoult
#76. There's no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn't nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would leave you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren't proud of.
Jodi Picoult
#77. If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can't someone be healed by happiness?
Jodi Picoult
#78. 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
#79. This wasn't the first time he'd be saving her by letting her go.
Jodi Picoult
#80. I do know that there are some things, though, that occur without a direct line of antecedents.
Jodi Picoult
#81. A lot of people have opinions, but I don't think they ever ask themselves why their opinions are what they are.
Jodi Picoult
#82. Don't say it. don't tell me that nobody's going to stare at me, because they will. don't tell me it doesn't matter, because it does. and don't tell me i look fine because that's a lie.
Jodi Picoult
#83. I should have known better than to trust a man who loved power ballads.
Jodi Picoult
#84. Siwa means Sophie," Sophie adds. "It means youngest sister,
Jodi Picoult
#85. You can stay up all night and still not count all the ways to lose the people you love.
Jodi Picoult
#86. Outside, the moon is a silver sliver. Every night, the shadow eats a slice of it, until it's nothing but this hollow rind. I feel the same way; with each day, I lose a little more of myself.
Jodi Picoult
#87. No matter who you are, there is some part of you that always wishes you were someone else.
Jodi Picoult
#88. If God wanted us to act on instinct, we wouldn't have the power of reason.
Jodi Picoult
#89. Dying of grief is the ultimate sacrifice, but it is not evolutionarily feasible. If grief were that overwhelming, a species would simply be erased.
Jodi Picoult
#90. Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets,lies,stories. We all tell them. Sometimes,because we hope to entertain. Sometimes,because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.
Jodi Picoult
#91. The human capacity for burden is like bamboo- far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance.
Jodi Picoult
#92. It's because of libraries that books like mine get recommended to book clubs and avid readers, who in turn pass them onto others looking to be whisked away from the world for a little while ... and perhaps to learn a bit about themselves in the process.
Jodi Picoult
#93. Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.
Jodi Picoult
#94. When we're awake, we see what we need to see. When we're asleep, we see what is really there.
Jodi Picoult
#95. And then Corinne - my colleague, my friend - says, "I'm sure it wasn't intentional." At
Jodi Picoult
#96. When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.
Jodi Picoult
#97. It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.
Jodi Picoult
#98. I don't know what I was thinking, coming out here. There are no silver bullets in life, there's just the long, messy climb out of the pit you've dug youself.
Jodi Picoult
#99. This judge has a chip on her shoulder the size of the whole goddamned courthouse.
Jodi Picoult
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