Small Great Things

by Jodi Picoult

Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

love has nothing to do with what you’re looking at, and everything to do with who’s looking.

It just goes to show you: every baby is born beautiful. It’s what we project on them that makes them ugly.

I still remember the moment I realized he was taller than me; how strange it felt to reach my arms up instead of down, to know that someone I’d been supporting his whole life was in a position to support me.

Although a lot of ethnic names are Swahili, Adisa comes from the Yoruba language, which she’ll tell you is West African—“where our ancestors actually came from when they were brought here as slaves.” It means, One who is clear. See, even her name judges the rest of us for not knowing the truths that she does.

In the middle of a crisis, time is viscous. You swim through it so slowly you cannot tell if you’re living or reliving each awful moment.

I’ve heard plenty of platitudes today: He’s in a better place; he’s a fallen soldier; time heals all wounds. What no one told me about grief is how lonely it is. No matter who else is mourning, you’re in your own little cell.

I sat with my hands in my lap, because I knew that sometimes when people spoke, it wasn’t because they had something important to say. It was because they had a powerful need for someone to listen.

“You’re destined to do small great things,” she told me. “Just like Dr. King said.” She was referring to one of her favorite quotes: If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

I have spent twenty years seeing how beautiful women are—not because of how they look, but because of what their bodies can withstand.

The loneliest creature on earth is a whale that has spent more than twenty years calling out for a mate, I read, but whose voice is so different from those of other whales that none of them ever respond.

I had assumed that justice was truly just, that jurors would assume I was innocent until proven guilty. But prejudice is exactly the opposite: judging before the evidence exists.

Pride is an evil dragon; it sleeps underneath your heart and then roars when you need silence.

I realize she doesn’t want me to think of her as the kind of mother who would feed her kids our fast food for breakfast, no more than I want her to think of me as someone who would work at this job if I had any other choice. I realize that we both desperately want to be people we really aren’t.

It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life and think you are seeing yourself clearly. And then one day, you peel off a filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, and you realize you’ve never truly seen yourself at all.

How am I supposed to encourage my son to be better than most people expect him to be? How can I say, with a straight face, you can be anything you want in this world—when I struggled and studied and excelled and still wound up on trial for something I did not do?

I hear the flow of the fountain behind me, and I think about water, how it might rise above its station as mist, flirt at being a cloud, and return as rain. Would you call that falling? Or coming home?

Who’d choose to dismantle the system that makes them special?”

We all do it, you know. Distract ourselves from noticing how time’s passing. We throw ourselves into our jobs. We focus on keeping the blight off our tomato plants. We fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping so that the weeks look the same on the surface. And then one day, you turn around, and your baby is a man. One day, you look in the mirror, and see gray hair. One day, you realize there is less of your life left than what you’ve already lived. And you think, How did this happen so fast? It was only yesterday when I was having my first legal drink, when I was diapering him, when I was young.

It is remarkable how events and truths can be reshaped, like wax that’s sat too long in the sun. There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment.

Freedom is the fragile neck of a daffodil, after the longest of winters. It’s the sound of your voice, without anyone drowning you out. It’s having the grace to say yes, and more important, the right to say no. At the heart of freedom, hope beats: a pulse of possibility.