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 I get in my head when I try to focus on that night.

When someone leaves you once, you expect it to happen again. Eventually you stop getting close enough to people to let them become important to you, because then you don’t notice when they drop out of your world.

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

Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together.

“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.”

the universe wants from us is two things: Don’t do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy.

If you think about someone you’ve loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details.