Nineteen Minutes

by Jodi Picoult

If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.

You can’t undo something that’s happened; you can’t take back a word that’s already been said out loud.

Hope, Patrick knew, was the exact measure of distance between himself and the person who’d come for help.

She’d wanted to be in her own house, with nobody else in it, and nothing pressing to do.

what made you happy once might not make you happy now.

in history as being the economist who’d conceived a mathematical formula for happiness: R/E, or, Reality divided by Expectations. There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.

Wasn’t getting what you wanted all along the very definition of being happy?

Prestige and power could make a man so attractive it took one’s breath away;

When you’re hurting deeply, you go inward.

maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.

Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.” “What’s the difference?” “The best thing is what you think should be done. The rightest thing is what needs to be done—when you think not just of you and how you feel, but also the extra stuff—who else is involved, and what’s happened before, and what the rules say.”

I think everything you need to know about the law you learn in kindergarten. You know: Don’t hit. Don’t take what’s not yours. Don’t kill people. Don’t rape them.”

Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it’s your fault—that if you’d tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn’t have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?

And that was the greatest heartbreak of all—no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.

happiness was U-shaped. People were happiest when they were very young and very old.

You could share DNA with someone and still have nothing in common with them.

Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or—in this case—feared might come to pass passed by instead.

When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.