"I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.
-Tibby"
— Ann Brashares (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

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

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

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

"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 didn't want to see her because it would make me feel better. I came because without her, it's hard to remember who I am..."
— Jodi Picoult

"If I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.

Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder.. But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.

The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding onto whatever scraps she had left.

"
— Jodi Picoult

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

"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)

"As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening."
— Jodi Picoult (The Tenth Circle)

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

"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 (Vanishing Acts)

"Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back."
— Jodi Picoult (Second Glance)

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I'd been broken beyond repair."
— Stephenie Meyer (New Moon)

"To love would be an awfully big adventure."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful."
— Milan Kundera

"Because with every action, comment, conversation, we have the choice to invite Heaven or Hell to Earth."
— Rob Bell

"The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"Why blame the dark for being dark? It is far more helpful to ask why the light isn’t as bright as it could be."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"God has spoken, and everything else is commentary."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"Agape doesn't love somebody because they're worthy.

Agape makes them worthy by the strength and power of its love.

Agape doesn't love somebody because they're beautiful.

Agape loves in such a way that it makes them beautiful."
— Rob Bell (Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality And Spirituality)

"What we do comes out of who we believe we are."
— Rob Bell (Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality And Spirituality)

"Love Wins"
— Rob Bell

"Everybody is following somebody. EVerybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"It takes quite a spine to turn the other cheek. It takes phenomenal fortitude to love your enemy. It takes firm resolve to pray for those who persecute you. (with reference to Matthew 5)"
— Rob Bell

"This is why for thousands of years Christians have found the cross to be so central to life. It speaks to us of God's suffering, God's pain, God's broken heart. It's God making the first move and then waiting for our response."
— Rob Bell

"Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts."

The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.

The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.""
— Rob Bell

"...sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself..."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always known He was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for her."
— Donald Miller

"Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"Live, laugh, love.

When you can feel someone else's pain and joy as if it's your own, thats when you know you really love them - Tina Lowell"
— Ann Brashares (Girls in Pants)

"I'm afraid of time... I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgements or mistakes everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots, not movies."
— Ann Brashares

"He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked."
— Ann Brashares

"She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?"
— Ann Brashares (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood)

"Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once."
— Ann Brashares (Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood)

"Don't talk to me. I'm tired and grumpy and I'll probably make fun of you."
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot."
— Ann Brashares