"You dont love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?"
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"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 (Mercy)

"If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"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 (Change of Heart)

"I, um, I have this problem. I broke up with my boyfriend, you see. And I'm pretty upset about it, so I wanted to talk to my best friend. [...] The thing is, they're both you."
— Jodi Picoult (The Pact: A Love Story)

"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

""You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?" "
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"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

"I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it."
— Jodi Picoult (Vanishing Acts)

"When you love someone you let them take care of you."
— Jodi Picoult

"In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn; color your hair; watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake 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. "
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

""Did you ever walk through a room that's packed with people, and feel so lonely you can hardly take the next step?" "
— Jodi Picoult (Second Glance)

"Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned."
— Jodi Picoult (Vanishing Acts)

"So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream."
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her."
— Jodi Picoult

"It's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?"
— Jodi Picoult

"See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed"
— Jodi Picoult

"Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without."
— Jodi Picoult (Perfect Match)

"Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it. "
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"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

"The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies"
— Jodi Picoult (Keeping Faith)

"Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall."
— Jodi Picoult

"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; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future."
— Jodi Picoult (Change of Heart)

"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."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"When we're awake, we see what we need to see. When we're asleep, we see what is really there."
— Jodi Picoult (Second Glance)

"There are two kinds of love...in the safe kind you look for someone who's exactly like you. It's what most folks settle for. But then there's the other kind of love. Everyone's born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave that piece that's a perfect fit. You'll search for it forever, if you have to. And if you're lucky enough to find it, it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe I could look just as perfect. But then, of course, when you try to get close to their other half, you don't fit anymore. That kind of love...you come out of it a different person than you were when you started."
— Jodi Picoult

"I learn from my own daughter that you don’t have to be awake to cry."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"Love is not a because, it's a no matter what."
— Jodi Picoult (Second Glance)

"Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong. "
— Jodi Picoult

"Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?"
— Jodi Picoult (The Tenth Circle)

"You can't exist in this world without leaving a piece of yourself behind."
— Jodi Picoult (Vanishing Acts)

""I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces."
— Jodi Picoult (The Pact: A Love Story)

"The bottom line is that we never fall for the people we're supposed to. "
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"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 the 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. "
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"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

"How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?"
— Jodi Picoult (The Pact: A Love Story)

"Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken."
— Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

"Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's beause it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on.

You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone's ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end.

But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like."
— Jodi Picoult

"It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)