A Spark of Light

by Jodi Picoult

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? —REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

And naturally she wanted to believe she would have been a hero, when push came to shove. But you never knew what path you’d take until you got to that crossroads.

Coal, with time and heat and pressure, will always become a diamond. But if you were freezing to death, which would you consider the gem?

She wondered if the only way any of us can find what we stand for is by first locating what we stand against.

We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.

Louie believed that those white men with their signs and slogans were not really there for the unborn, but there for the women who carried them. They couldn’t control women’s sexual independence. To them, this was the next best thing.

This is what it means to be human, Bex thought. We are all just canvases for our scars.

You don’t look at another person’s plate to see if they have more than you. You look to see if they have enough.

Violence, from one angle, looked like mercy from another.

It was that often you couldn’t see the shape of something when you were stuck inside it. You couldn’t be objective if you were too close.

You could take all the precautions in the world, and bad things still happened.

the words of Leonardo da Vinci: While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

George told himself this was no different from being a soldier. In war, killing wasn’t murder, it was a mission.

this was indeed some crazy world, where the waiting period to get an abortion was longer than the waiting period to get a gun.

this woman who was anti-contraception was also anti-abortion. Wasn’t that counterintuitive? If you didn’t want abortions, shouldn’t you at least be throwing free condoms and birth control pills out to anyone who would take them?

What she would miss were these details. She wondered if, when you left this world, you got to take a certain number of them deep in your pockets, clenched in your fists, or tucked high on the roof of your mouth, with you forever.

federal funds already were legally prohibited from being used for abortions. They covered gynecological care; abortions were self-funding. In fact, they were the only procedure reproductive health services clinics offered that didn’t operate at a loss. If Planned Parenthood was defunded, it wouldn’t stop abortions. Abortions would literally be the only things they could afford to do.