The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

you cannot separate good and evil cleanly, that they are conjoined twins sharing a single heart.

“Power isn’t doing something terrible to someone who’s weaker than you, Reiner. It’s having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.” He turned to me.

We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it.

Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love—well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.

I wondered how many people in prison were actually criminals at all.

There is a magic to intimacy, a world built of sighs and skin that is thicker than brick, stronger than iron. There is only you, and him, so impossibly close that nothing can come between. Not the enemy, not your allies. In this safe haven, in this hallowed place and time, I could even ask the questions whose answers I feared.

“It turns out that the more you repeat the same action, no matter how reprehensible, the more you can make an excuse for it in your own mind.”

Sometimes all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.

What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet?

The geeks shall inherit the earth.

do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. It’s saying, You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me. It’s saying, You don’t get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a