The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

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.” —Unknown

have had a good life. I have loved, and have been loved. I have helped people. I’ve found a career—maybe not the one I intended, but one that has been rewarding all the same. If I die today, I would be able to say with honesty that I left this world a tiny bit better than how I found it.

‘You can plan for something your whole life, and still get taken by surprise,’

“Well, as long as someone remembers you, you never really die.”

“That’s the thing about being obsessed with the past. It keeps you from having to notice the present.”

“How come when a woman takes power it’s ambitious? And when a man does it, it’s the natural order of things?”

I wonder why we always want to have conversations with the people we love when we’ve run out of time.

that last words are lasting words.

“After fifteen years, love isn’t just a feeling,” he says. “It’s a choice.”

someone I didn’t just want to be with, but someone I wanted to be more like.

I didn’t want to be the one left behind, and the only way to ensure that is to be the one who leaves.

opposite of love, you think, isn’t hate. It’s complacency.

I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye.

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

Maybe the miracle isn’t where we wind up, but that we get there at all.

about how to (as one lovely reader put it) “die gracefully when the time comes…and how to live gratefully until then.”