Jodi Picoult Quotes
Quotes from Jodi Picoult's Novel Change of Heart
*As it turned out, though, it was a lot easier to say that someone deserved to die for what they did than it was to take the responsibility to make that happen.*
*In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; it's the legroom for the lies you'll tell youself in the future.*
*They say God won't give you more than you can handle, but that begs a more important question: why would God let you suffer in the first place?*
*"Heaven's not a place." "I didn't say it had map coordinates..." "If it was the sky, then birds would get there before you. If it was under the sea, fish would be first." "Then where is it?" I asked. "It's inside you," Shay said, "and outside too." ..."If this is heaven, I'll take a rain check." "You can't wait for it, because it's already here."*
*"You can track every polarizing issue in this country to religion. Stem cell research, the war in Iraq, the right to die, gay marriage, abortion, evolution, even the death penalty - what's the fault line? That Bible of yours... You really think Jesus would be happy with the way the world's turned out?"*
*No matter what Mr. Philosopher Next Door thought, there were things I knew for sure; That I had been loved, once, and had loved back. That a person could find hope in the way a weed grew. That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes. I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions - as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.
*I suppose there was a point in my life when I wanted the package deal... the husband, the kids, the carpools - but somewhere along the line, I'd just stopped hoping. I had gotten used to living alone, to saving the other half of the can of soup for the next night's dinner, to only changing the pillowcases on my side of the bed. I had become over comfortable with myself, so much so that anyone else would have felt like an intrusion.*
"Remember when you were little, a kid - and you'd fall asleep in the car? And someone would carry you out and put you into bed, so that when you woke up in the morning, you knew automatically you were home again? That's what I think it's like to die."*
*It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A child was the love you didn't have to look for, didn't have to prove anything to, didn't have to worry about losing.*
*...there are all sorts of experiences that we can't really put a name to... The birth of a child, for one. Or the death of a parent. Falling in love. Words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder. Finding God is like that, too. If it's happened to you, you know what it feels like. But try to describe it to someone else - and language only takes you so far.*
*Finding God's grace wasn't like locating missing keys or the forgotten name of a 1940's pinup girl - it was more of a feeling: the sun breaking through an overcast morning, the softest bed sinking under your weight. And of course, you couldn't find God's grace unless you admitted you were lost.*
*I would tell Claire about the elephants when she woke up, I decided. About a country where mothers and daughters walked side by side for years with their aunts and sisters. About how elephants were either right-handed or left-handed. How they could find their way home years after they'd left. Here is what I wouldn't tell Claire, ever: That elephants know when they're close to dying, and they make their way to a riverbed for nature to take its course. That elephants bury their dead, and grieve. That naturalists have seen a mother elephant carry a dead calf for miles, cradled in her trunk, unwilling and unable to let it go.*
*You know how I see it? 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.*
Quotes from Jodi Picoult's Novel My Sister's Keeper
*Love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow -- beautiful while's it's there... and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.*
*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.*
*We fall back into silence. I look around XO Cafe and notice that chatter happens mostly at tables where the diners are young and hip. The older couples, the ones sporting wedding bands that wink with their silverware, eat without the pepper of conversation. Is it because they are so comfortable, the already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?*
*Is there any place on Earth that smells better than a laundromat? It's like a rainy Sunday when you don't have to get out from under the covers, or lying back on the grass your father's just mowed -- comfort food for your nose.*
*I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.*
*There's some illogical part of me that still believes, if you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be something worth saving.*
*My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding on 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.*
*What I didn't count on were the tall walls that grew around me, or the belly of the planet, hot under my sneakers. Digging straight down, I'd gotten hopelessly lost. In a tunnel, you have to light your own way, and I've never been very good at that. When I yelled out, my father found me in seconds, although I'm sure I waited through several lives. He crawled into the pit, torn between my hard work and my stupidity. 'This could have collapsed on you!' he said, and lifted me onto solid ground. From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached his chest. Darkness, you know, is relative.*
*Summertime, I think, is a collective unconsious. We all remember the notes that made up the song of the ice cream man; we all know what it feels like to brand our thighs on a playground slide that's heated up like a knife in a fire; we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beating across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little longer than the last one, when in fact it's all going in the other direction.*
*In the upper left quadrant of the sky, a radiant burts in a new stream of sparks... 'Is it like this every night while we're asleep?' It is a remarkable question -- Do all the wonderful things happen when we are not aware of them?... Every second, another streak of silver grows; parentheses, exclamation points, commas -- a whole grammer made up of light, for words too hard to say.*
*Shooting stars are not stars at all. They're just rocks that enter the atmosphere and catch fire under friction. What we wish on, when we see one, is only a trail of debris.*
*I don't know how to say what I really want to: that people you love can surprise you every day. That maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.*
*You don't love someone because they're perfect... you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.*
Quotes from Jodi Picoult's Novel Plain Truth
*You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget about your own bad luck.*
*We couldn't love each other in my world, and we couldn't love each other in her world. But all that love, all that energy, it had to go somewhere. It went into that baby. Even if we couldn't have each other, we would have both had him.*
*And he put his arms around you... and said that even if everyone else turned their backs, even if you never saw your friends or family again, a world with only you and him and the baby would feel down right crowded because of all the love that would be stuffed into it.*
*He kissed her gently and she wondered how you could come so close to a person that there was not a breath of space between you, and still feel like a canyon had ripped the earth raw between your feet.*
Quotes from Jodi Picoult's Novel Nineteen Minutes
*In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn; color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can back scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five. In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world; or you can just jump off it.*
*When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You become the mutant who fell into a vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart. You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like.*
*When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather the storm.*
*You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed; the length of a sleeping baby's eyelash, the span of a child's hand. Life turns on a dime, and - it turns out - so does one's conscience.*
