Small Great Things

by Jodi Picoult

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

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

“No, the point is you can do as the Romans do all you want, but it don’t mean the Emperor will let you into his palace.”

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

That if our legacy is not entitlement, it must be hope. Because if it’s not, then we become the shiftless, the wandering, the conquered. We become what they think we are.

they made fun of me because I had wavy hair, instead of kinks like theirs, and because my skin was light.

“Maybe if you let it slide a little, they’d like you more.”

I lock the doors for safety’s sake.

Driving slowly out of the neighborhood, I wait until I see children playing outside and then pull over to the curb and call Howard’s cell.

what caused the pepper to run from the soap was surface tension.

There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.

“The State’s got the burden of proof,” Edison says. “Kind of like we do, every day.”