|
990e6a1
|
Your hand fits mine like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
522a83a
|
I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you always know what's hidden underneath.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
b897576
|
be a good listener, don't judge and don't put boundaries on someone else's grief.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
7de8426
|
Other people look at me and think: But all I see when I look at you is that girl who had memorized all the words to Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by the time she was three, the girl who crawls into bed with me whenever there's a thunderstorm - not because you're afraid but because am, the girl whose laugh has always vibrated inside my own body like a tuning fork. I would never have wished for an able-bodied child, because that child would..
|
|
motherly-love
parent
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
5615ea8
|
I've never been in love, but I've always imagined it--weirdly--like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. "Love," the host will say, "makes life a lit..
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
5558d1c
|
They ask, how could this happen here? Well. How could it not happen here?
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
9a6f6a8
|
Here's my question: What age are you when you're in Heaven?
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
fae750c
|
i don't need you. i never needed you." "well, i fucking needed you!"
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
a607004
|
There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
9f58eb2
|
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 |
|
725d118
|
You know what I noticed when I was with Jacob? In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There's the telephone, and the fax - and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way around the world. You've got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
15d7a3e
|
People change, but only if you give them room to do it.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
b8d12ea
|
How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
e6693fe
|
The nurses, I have already learned, are the ones who give us the answers we're desperate for. Unlike the doctors, who fidget like they need to be somewhere else, the nurses patiently answer us as if we are the first set of parents to ever have this kind of meeting with them, instead of the thousandth.
|
|
inspirational
nurses
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
a80d828
|
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.
|
|
love-story
lovers
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
3dd4f75
|
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
eb43ea9
|
You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to popentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
05d97c7
|
But as he grew older, he learned that a word was a powerful thing. An insult didn't have to be shouted to bleed; a vow didn't have to be whispered to make you believe. Hold a thought in your head, and that was enough to change the actions of anyone and anything that crossed your path.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
c9a1e28
|
There's an honesty to the wolf world that is liberating. There's no diplomacy, no decorum. You tell your enemy you hate him; you show your admiration by confessing the truth. That directness doesn't work with humans, who are masters of subterfuge. Does this dress make me look fat? Do you really love me? Did you miss me? When a person asks this, she doesn't want to know the real answer. She wants you to lie to her. After two years of living ..
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
aeffd76
|
Have you ever really held the hand of someone you love? Not just in passing, a loose link between you - but truly clasped, with the pulses of your wrists beating together and your fingers mapping the knuckles and nails like a cartographer learning a country by heart?
|
|
salem-falls
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
a9e74e2
|
what made you happy once might not make you happy now.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
4f4f5df
|
When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.
|
|
words
feelings
love
truth
show
habit
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
bb19915
|
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 |
|
f78a0a0
|
What's worse ...? The devil you don't know ... or the devil you do?
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
1dd3d02
|
When she smiles, it feels like the first warm day of March-- after an eternity of snow, when you suddenly remember how summer feels on the backs of your bare calves & in the part of your hair.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
9eba89c
|
Exactly one month after he was convicted, when the lights were dimmed and the detention officers made a final sweep of the catwalk, Peter reached down and tugged off his right sock. He turned on his side in the lower bunk, so that he was facing the wall. He fed the sock into his mouth, stuffing it as far back as it would go. When it got hard to breathe, he fell into a dream. He was still eighteen, but it was the first day of kindergarten. H..
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
3c72f64
|
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?
|
|
inspirational
thought-provoking
sad
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
7cc4d80
|
Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river.
|
|
loss
life-lessons
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
f336457
|
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.
|
|
kindness
religion
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
cfc695b
|
Do you remember the summer we signed you up for camp? And the night before you left, you said you've changed your mind and wanted to stay home? I told you to to get a seat on the left side of the bus, so when you pulled away, you'd be able to look back and see me there waiting for you." I press her hand against my cheek, hard enough to leave a mark. "You get that same seat in Heaven. One where you can watch me, watching you."
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
31ccb1a
|
A wish is just words. Belief is the catalyst. It's what sets that wish into motion.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
89abfe2
|
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.
|
|
self-sacrifice
self-pity
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
b821028
|
My mother, who would always buy her books new, hated it the vintage hardcovers with their cracked spines and threadbare cloth covers. True you couldn't go in there and buy the latest best seller, but when you held one of those volumes in your hands, you were leafing through another person'a life. Someone else had once loved that story, too. Someone else had carried that book in a backpack, devoured it over breakfast, mopped up that coffee s..
|
|
history
smells
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
3348211
|
There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
d8d0787
|
You figured that the only way I'd be happy is if I did the things you thought would be best for me.
|
|
relationship
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
cf4cd92
|
Everytime I look at a zebra, I can't figure out whether it's black with white stripes or white with black stripes, and that frustrates me.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
ee0cc47
|
Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: we take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
4632ff3
|
Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't see clearly?
|
|
seeing
love
crime
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
bf935dc
|
We all have things that come back to haunt us. Some of us just see them more clearly than others.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
2c56cb7
|
Active racism is telling a nurse supervisor that an African American nurse can't touch your baby. It's snickering at a black joke. But passive racism? It's noticing there's only one person of color in your office and not asking your boss why. It's reading your kid's fourth-grade curriculum and seeing that the only black history covered is slavery, and not questioning why. It's defending a woman in court whose indictment directly resulted fr..
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
38a617a
|
Sometimes I think there's no such thing as falling in love. It's just the fear of losing someone.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
ed55710
|
I'm the princess in an ivory tower, except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
e830932
|
if you think of a relationship as a living entity, I guess it's one thing if the missing two percent is, like, a fingernail. But when it's the heart, that's a whole different ball of wax.
|
|
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
0c39989
|
Men. You can't live with them...and you can't legally shoot them. I tossed out my husband eight years ago and got a llama instead. Best decision I ever made.
|
|
men
|
Jodi Picoult |