The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you’re alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

But anyway, it would still be a miracle,” Mary says, “because it gives desperate people some hope.”

“A child who believed in fairy tales. Not the silly Disney ones your mother read to you, but the ones with blood and thorns, with girls who knew that love could kill you just as often as it could set you free.

It is as if she knew, even at that young age, that you cannot separate good and evil cleanly, that they are conjoined twins sharing a single heart.

I used to think,” Josef says quietly, “that there are some weeds that are just as beautiful as flowers.”

“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 believe what we want to, what we need to. The corollary is that we choose not to see what we’d rather pretend doesn’t exist.

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

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

Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others. But how can anyone exist in a world where nobody is who he seems to be?

History isn’t about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them.

I do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds. I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for—even if it’s just a better tomorrow—is the most powerful drug on this planet.

‘What he did was wrong. He doesn’t deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it’s choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you.’

But forgiving isn’t something you 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 future.”