"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)

"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

"… true love is felonious… You take someone’s breath away… You rob them of the ability to utter a single word… You steal a heart. "
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth."
— Jodi Picoult (Handle with Care)

"You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future."
— Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

"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)

"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

"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)

"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

""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)

"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)

""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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

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

"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

"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)

"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)

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

"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)

"Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it. "
— 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

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

"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

"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 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)

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

""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)

"Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look."
— 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)

"How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?"
— Jodi Picoult (Mercy)

"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

"...seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"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)

"Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him."
— 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

"Things had a way of working out for the best when you let them run their course."
— Jodi Picoult (Plain Truth)

"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

"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)