A Spark of Light

by Jodi Picoult

understand that sometimes the best communication is not speaking at all. Active listening can get you a lot farther than spouting off.

What hellish tributary of evolution had made reproduction—and all the shit that came with it—the woman’s job? She thought about all the women who had sat in the very chair she was in, and the stories that had brought them here, and how, for one brief chapter, they all intersected. A sisterhood of desperation.

Perhaps the question wasn’t When does a fetus become a person? but When does a woman stop being one?

When you say you can’t do something because your religion forbids it, that’s a good thing. When you say I can’t do something because your religion forbids it, that’s a problem.”