Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

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.

Engaging with haters is like rearranging pictures on the Titanic. What’s the point?

Dreaming is the closest the average human gets to the paranormal plane; it’s the time when the mind lets down its guard and the walls get thin enough for there to be glimpses to the other side.

“It’s not that he doesn’t love you enough to tell you the truth,” she said. “It’s that he loves you too much to risk it.”

I was a liar. I was hurting people who did not even know they were being hurt. And I still was not strong enough to stop myself.

There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else. Eventually someone brave and stupid will come along and try to fill that hole. But it never works, and so instead, that selfless soul winds up with a gap in his heart, too. And so on. It’s a miracle that anyone survives, when so much of us is missing.

You might live on top of the biggest toxic waste dump on the planet, but if you never dig, then all you ever know is that your grass is green and your garden is lush.