Nineteen Minutes

by Jodi Picoult

If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going. –

Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuous room, sure – a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter – but it was also a room from which there really wasn’t an escape.

There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.

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

‘If you become the job, then when do you get to be you?’

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?

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

Do you think it’s your fault – that if you’d tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn’t have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?

And then there’s my personal favorite: They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

you could only change the lens through which you looked at them.

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?

Dead was dead. When you died, you did not get to come back and see what you were missing. You didn’t get to apologize. You didn’t get a second chance.

Matthew Royston’s memorial service was held in a church that wasn’t large enough to hold the grief of its mourners.

‘Blessed are those who mourn,’ the pastor read, ‘for they will be comforted.’

But true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated.

The measure of joy brought by the familiar was amplified or reduced by the individual’s resistance to change.

for every person like himself who liked the worn grooves of the familiar, there was another person who found it stifling.

happiness equals reality divided by expectation

When he said this, he pictured his life as a graph. Normal was a line that stretched on and on, teasing its way closer to an axis but never really reaching it.

But when you inverted the equation – expectation divided by reality – you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.

Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to create optimism.

you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at any provocation.

change. But, conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality.

Patrick stared at the purple background, the flaming red letters that scrolled like a marquee: READY OR NOT . . . HERE I COME.

She winged a prayer to whoever might move the mountains that could be men’s hearts.

watched her the way you’d stare at a butterfly that you’d only known as a caterpillar,

She watched Matt on the screen the way you might study an animal you had never seen before, if you had to memorize it and tell the world later what you found.

There was a point where the events of your life became a tsunami; Lacy knew, because she’d been washed away once before by grief. When that happened, you would find yourself days later on unfamiliar ground, rootless. The only other choice you had was to move to higher ground while you still could.

How long could you march along on a parallel track with your child before you lost any chance of intersecting her life?

For someone renowned for her good judgment, she suddenly seemed to be lacking any.

took. If you want to have a pity party, set the table for one.’

If you were drifting with a thousand other people, could you really still say you were lost?

a daughter carved from her own body had become someone Alex no longer understood.

You could patch up whatever was broken, but if you were the one who had fixed it, you’d always know in your heart where the fault lines lay.

mottled flush rose up his neck, as if memory could be burned into the flesh.

Lacy was used to holding new life in her hands, not feeling it pass from the body in her arms. It was just another transition – pregnancy to birth, child to adult, life to death

Peter still fit into her embrace.

There was a game Lewis used to play with himself, after the kids were born, when he was feeling so ridiculously lucky that surely tragedy was bound to strike. He’d lie in bed and force himself to choose what he was first willing to lose: his marriage, his job, a child. He would wonder how much a man could take before he reduced himself to nothing.

‘The right thing sets you up to be incredibly lonely, sometimes.’

If everyone

else’s opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

you. That only if you’d felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.

you might have to lose control before you could find what

you’d been missing.

There’s nothing that compares to those first few months when all you can think of is each other. I mean, love in any form is pretty fabulous . . . but falling in love . . . well.’

When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself. –

‘This entire spree lasted nineteen minutes in the life of Peter Houghton, but the evidence will show that its effects will last forever.

‘Something still exists as long as there’s someone around to remember it, right?’

But a big part of it, too, is the society that created both Peter and those bullies. Peter’s response is one enforced by the world he lives in.