"If you want to see God laugh, make a plan."
— Jody Picoult

"You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything."
— Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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."
— Jodi Picoult (Perfect Match)

"The human capactiy for burden is like bamboo- far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance. "
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet we push it just the same."
— Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)

"You can't edit a blank page"
— 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)

"...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 (My Sister's Keeper)

"When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep her close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: Until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one."
— Jodi Picoult Vanishing Acts

"And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt."
— Jodi Picoult (Change of Heart)

"But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head."
— Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)

"You can't stop the future
You can't rewind the past
The only way to learn the secret
...is to press play."
— Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)

"In the end....everything matters."
— Jay Asher

"Like driving along a bumpy road and losing control of the steering wheel, tossing you--just a tad--off the road. The wheels kick up some dirt, but you're able to pull it back. Yet no matter how hard you try to drive straight, something keeps jerking you to the side. You have so little control over anything anymore. And at some point, the struggle becomes too much--too tiring--and you consider letting go. Allowing tragedy...or whatever...to happen."
— Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)

"A lot of you cared, just not enough."
— Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)

"What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.

If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.

For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."
— Mother Teresa

"I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much."
— Mother Teresa

"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
— Albert Einstein (The World As I See It)

"(The Christian) does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."
— C.S. Lewis

"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
— C.S. Lewis

"I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, he will not ask, 'How many good things have you done in your life?' rather he will ask, 'How much love did you put into what you did?'"
— Mother Teresa

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
— Oscar Wilde

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her."
— Max Lucado

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."
— C.S. Lewis

"God has no religion."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word "darkness" on the walls of his cell."
— C.S. Lewis

"God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing."
— C.S. Lewis

"To you, I'm an atheist.
To God, I'm the loyal opposition."
— Woody Allen

"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13)"
— Various (Holy Bible: King James Version)

"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."
— Dorothy Parker

"God created war so that Americans would learn geography."
— Mark Twain

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families."
— Jay McInerney (The Last of the Savages)

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
— Charles Bukowski

"Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Black holes are where God divided by zero."
— Albert Einstein

"Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
— Walt Whitman

"Above all else, guard your heart for it affects everything else you do.

Proverbs 4:23"
— Various (Holy Bible)

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
— C.S. Lewis

"Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
— C.S. Lewis

"I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me."
— C.S. Lewis

"Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake. "
— Victor Hugo