The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

My mother used to say that blue eyes were bad luck, because you could see everything that a blue-eyed person was thinking, but I didn’t heed the warning the first time I met Wyatt Armstrong.

Life asked death, “Why do people love me but hate you?” Death responded, “Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.”

I once read that every story is a love story. Love of a person, a country, a way of life. Which means, of course, that all tragedies are about losing what you love.

Ancient Egyptians believed that the first and most necessary ingredient in the universe was chaos. It could sweep you away, but it was also the place from which all things start anew.

The thing about death is that we’re all terrified of it happening, and we’re devastated when it does, and we go out of our way to pretend that neither of these things is true.

Love isn’t a perfect match, but an imperfect one. You are rocks in a tumbler. At first you bump, you scrape, you snag. But each time that happens, you smooth each other’s edges, until you wear each other down. And if you are lucky, at the end of all that, you fit.

To show someone your soul, you have to bleed. People who are comfortable—people who are content—they don’t create art.”

I know this much: morality is meant to be a clear line, but it’s not really. Things change. Shit happens. Who we are is about not what we do, but why we tell ourselves we do it.

You start with a unified whole, and then as time passes, you differentiate and organize and divide. Creation, by definition, is separation. Moving forward means being split apart.

There’s really no such thing as a right or wrong choice. We don’t make decisions. Our decisions make us.”