The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

Unlike me, she has no patience for anyone over the age of forty.

“I was lost.” We all are, I suppose. It’s why we come here: to stay tethered to what’s missing.

“You can love a pet more than you love some people,”

“It doesn’t matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it’s there.”

Yes, it’s my name, but the double entendre—that I’m full of wisdom—has never really applied.

I’ve thought a lot about it: how you can ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom.

But thinking doesn’t change anything, does it?

I’d realize that when she gardens, she never sees the seed. She is already picturing the plant it will become. I imagine she thought the same, meeting me.

Pepper and Saffron,

good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.

he doesn’t look people in the eye. He says that’s how someone can steal your soul. Amen to that.

I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve.

Unfortunately it wasn’t “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” It was the Munchkins, performing “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.”

Religion isn’t in your DNA. You don’t believe just because your parents believe.”

“A lot of survivors had their tattoos surgically removed, but she said seeing it every morning reminds her that she won.”

And you know I don’t believe in God.” She moves, blocking my path. “That doesn’t mean He doesn’t believe in you,” she says.

But Josef, he is either too polite or too embarrassed to mention it. Or maybe, just maybe, there are other things about me he finds more interesting.

Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician’s sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time.

“So it is not a no,” he says cautiously. “This is good.” “This is not good,”

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

“The only monsters I have ever known were men,” I said.

“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.”

We collapsed against each other, snorting and hooting, until everyone else got disgusted with us and looked away.

It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable to write yourself free.

Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

“It’s missing,” I said. My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. “Yes,” she said. “But see how much of me is left?”

“On that first date, I asked him what he saw in me. And he said, My future.”

When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.

She became whomever she needed to be to survive, but she never let anyone else define her.