The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

There are all sorts of losses people suffer—from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.

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

But the lack of sound pounds like a heartbeat. It’s deafening. That’s the paradox of loss: How can something that’s gone weigh us down so much?

sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you’re alone.

“The Nazis didn’t just target Jews. They also killed Gypsies and Poles and homosexuals and the mentally and physically disabled.

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.

desperate people often do things that they normally would not do.

Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn’t even any guilt.

at any given moment, we are capable of doing what we least expect.

History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?” She shakes her head. “All of that, and the world didn’t learn anything. Look around. There’s still ethnic cleansing. There’s discrimination.

“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.”

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

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. You would think bearing witness to something like this would make a difference, and yet this isn’t so. In the newspapers I have read about history repeating itself in Cambodia. Rwanda. Sudan.

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

I don’t believe in God. But sitting there, in a room full of those who feel otherwise, I realize that 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.

in Judaism, there are two wrongs that can’t be forgiven. The first is murder, because you have to actually go to the wronged party and plead your case, and obviously you can’t if the victim is six feet underground. But the second unforgivable wrong is ruining someone’s reputation. Just like a dead person can’t forgive the murderer, a good reputation can’t ever be reclaimed. During the Holocaust, Jews were killed, and their reputation was destroyed.

Jesus challenges us to do is to let go of the wrong done to you personally, not the wrong done to someone else.

But most Christians incorrectly assume this means that being a good Christian means forgiving all sins, and all sinners.”

‘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.’

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.”