Larger Than Life

by Jodi Picoult

When the matriarch is gone, so is the herd’s collective memory.

I wonder, when women who buy beautiful ivory jewelry fasten those elaborate pendants around their throats, if they are choked by sadness.

I wonder if they know how disgusting they are. Buckets of blood are poured on people who wear furs. I think that people who wear ivory or have things made of ivory in their homes should be similarly doused.

There is a reason people say being a mother is the hardest job in the world: You do not sleep and you do not get vacation time. You do not leave your work on your desk at the end of the day. Your briefcase is your heart, and you are rifling through it constantly. Your office is as wide as the world, and your punch card is measured not in hours but in a lifetime.

Simply because I couldn’t see something didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

I imagined this was what it felt like to be psychic.

It is.

“It’s so easy to forget,” she murmured, “how underneath, we’re all exactly the same.”

As I grew older I learned that not being able to observe a magnified world was not an evolutionary design flaw after all. In fact, it was a means of protection. What we could not see clearly, we didn’t have to pretend to understand.

I am a big fan of quantum mechanics, and love that I can understand it without being able to see it. It's like religion, but true.

elephant-back safari

In Tswana, there are two ways to say goodbye. Tsamaya sentle means “go well.” Sala sentle means “stay well.” It depends on whether you are the one leaving or the one being left behind.

This book has truly broken my heart.