Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve. The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it . . . some stories just don’t have a happy ending.

memory is linked to strong emotion, and that negative moments are like scribbling with permanent marker on the wall of the brain. But there’s a fine line between a negative moment and a traumatic one. Negative moments get remembered. Traumatic ones get forgotten, or so warped that they are unrecognizable, or else they turn into the big, bleak, white nothing

Donny used to call her his ghost, the case that haunted him for years.

I work alone, unless you count Jack Daniel’s as an employee.

I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely.

growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.

if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together.

making this child believe in me when I cannot even believe in myself.

All of which came dangerously close to my beliefs—the same beliefs that I was ridiculed for, here.

“I just changed the focus of my fieldwork to how elephants grieve.” He glanced at me. “They’re better at it than people.”

“When an elephant is brought to us at the sanctuary, she’s already broken. We do our best to put her back together again. But it’s all guesswork, unless you know what she looked like when she was whole.”

but when I faced him he was not looking at the elephants. He was staring at me.

“My father died last year,” Thomas said. “I still look for him in crowds.”

“I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room—but eventually, you learn to live with it.”

protection of the calves is the responsibility of the entire herd. They cluster, with the babies walking in the middle.

It was almost as if there was a tear in the fabric I was made of, and he was the only color thread that would match to stitch it back up.

so trapped by the past that he can’t accept the future.

Could it be as simple as that? Could love be not grand gestures or empty vows, not promises meant to be broken, but instead a paper trail of forgiveness? A line of crumbs made of memories, to lead you back to the person who was waiting?