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.

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.

Joy wondered how you get someone you think is blind to see what you see. It certainly can’t happen when you’re standing on opposite sides of a wall.

“You don’t have to be a hero,” Quandt said quietly. Hugh met his gaze. “I’m not. I’m a father.”

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

Some men wear responsibility and some are worn by it; Hugh had always been the former.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, Dr. King had said, what are you doing for others?

There was only one reason he got out of his car every damn morning: the women he treated, who had to walk through that same gauntlet. How could he be any less brave than they were?

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.

Yes!!

Life had repeatedly served her a big old side dish of miserable anytime she had a taste of anything good.

It was just another layer of icing on the shitcake of her life.

When it came down to it, at the end, you did not think. You felt.

What did she feel? That you will never cease to underestimate yourself. That love is fleeting. That life is a miracle. That the reason she had come to this clinic, on this day, at this hour, was this. Acting purely on instinct, Olive Lemay threw herself in front of the bullet.

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.

“Like Dr. King said: It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

“You bet I am. I love women. All women.” Izzy cut a glance toward Janine, still passed out on the floor. “All women?” “All women,” Dr. Ward repeated. “And you should, too.” He turned to Izzy. “Like it or not, you’re in this fight together.”

“All that legal protection you want for the unborn,” Joy said. “Great. Give it to them. But only if you can find a way to not take it away from me.”

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

Did you have to be missed to exist?

You don’t know what you don’t know, Neil deGrasse Tyson had said, a year ago. But now, for the first time, Wren really understood.

In the abstract, eliminating everyone who was tied to the Center had seemed masterful, necessary. In truth, it was messy.

For years the employees had coexisted with the protesters the way that oil and water settled in a jar: in the same space, but separate.

Any of us can rationalize the things we do. But he hoped empathy would spread, an invasive weed of compassion.

A day or two later, after he performed their abortions, these same women would call him a killer again as he walked from his car into his place of work. He did not consider them frauds. He understood why they felt they had to go back to being who everyone else in their social circles believed them to be.

there was no right way to do the wrong thing.

Parenthood was like awakening to find a soap bubble in the cup of your palm, and being told you had to carry it while you parachuted from a dizzying height, climbed a mountain range, battled on the front lines. All you wanted to do was tuck it away, safe from natural disasters and violence and prejudice and sarcasm, but that was not an option. You lived in daily fear of watching it burst, of breaking it yourself. Somehow you knew that if it disappeared, you would, too.

What twisted deity would grant you the superpower of fatherhood to protect someone who, one day, would not need you?

The vast majority of protesters were men, and it made perfect sense to Louie—the male of the species felt threatened by the biology of women.

Even in the Bible, normal female biological functions were made pathological: You were unclean when you had your menses. Childbirth had to occur in pain. And there was the questionable nature of those who bled regularly—but did not die.

There was, of course, the history, too. Women had been property. Their chastity had always belonged to a man, until abortion and contraception put control of women’s sexuality in the women’s hands. If women could have sex without the fear of unwanted pregnancy, then suddenly the man’s role had shrunk to a level somewhere between unnecessary and vestigial. So instead, men vilifie...

Vonita, God rest her soul, used to say that if men were the ones to get pregnant, abortion would probably be a sacrament. The Super Bowl halftime show would celebrate it. Men who had terminated pregnancies would be asked to stand and be applauded at church for the courage to make ...

There is a moment when you realize that no matter how well you plan, how carefully you organize, you are at the mercy of chaos.

That was the moment he realized that Wren did not belong to him. In fact, Hugh belonged to her.

Sometimes you can’t tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence.

That’s what you did for people you loved, right? You protected them from what they didn’t want to know.

Studies have shown that when presented with a list, the default of the brain is to pick whatever is first. The same holds true for voting, and ballots.

George told himself this was no different from being a soldier. In war, killing wasn’t murder, it was a mission. Today he fought for the army of God.

Dr. King’s words beat in his head: If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.

Louie’s final thought before he passed out was that this was indeed some crazy world, where the waiting period to get an abortion was longer than the waiting period to get a gun.

They were familiar enough to be upsetting. The bottom line was this: a zygote, an embryo, a fetus, a baby—they were all human. But at what point did that human deserve legal protection?

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

There wasn’t a person on earth who could accurately catalog the contents of their console and glove compartment.

There was such art in the ordinary, it could leave you in tears.

If Planned Parenthood was defunded, it wouldn’t stop abortions. Abortions would literally be the only things they could afford to do.

Sometimes Louie felt like they only existed in relation to the antis. If they all disappeared, would he go up in a puff of smoke? Could you stand for something if there wasn’t an opposition?

He paid attention to the race of those who came to the Center because for him, the politics of abortion had so much in common with the politics of racism.

The biggest difference between the North and the South was not the weather or the food or even the people—it was religion. Here, religion was as much of the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. You had to offer folks a chance to be pro-choice not in spite of their faith, but because of it.