Nineteen Minutes

by Jodi Picoult

when she was with him, she felt herself evaporating. Sometimes, when he touched her, Josie imagined herself vanishing in a puff of steam.

If she appeared the same on the outside, it was that much easier to ignore the fact that she didn’t really know how she felt on the inside.

R/E, or, Reality divided by Expectations. There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.

Labor was hard for everyone, Lacy knew, but especially hard for the women who had expectations and lists and plans, because it was never the way you thought it would be. In order to labor well, you had to let your body take over, instead of your mind. You revealed yourself, even the parts you had forgotten about. For someone like Alex, who was so used to being in control, this could be devastating. Success would come only at the expense of losing her cool, at the risk of turning into someone she did not want to be.

the ability to form a skeleton of the truth from the bare bones of memory.

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?

She felt herself dissolving, and wondered if you could turn into a ghost without dying; if that part of it was only a technicality.

When he was around Josie, he didn’t feel anything—didn’t want to kiss her or hold her hand or anything like that. He didn’t think he felt those things about guys, either; but surely you had to be gay or straight. You couldn’t be neither.

She had nothing left inside. She’d given it all to her son. 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.

because one person’s trauma is another’s loss of innocence.

Lewis sighed. “For God’s sake . . .” “This is lame,” Joey added.

What a shitty family tbh

The thing about death, Lacy knew, was that it robbed you of your vocabulary for comfort.

and they’d laugh about her journey to the underworld.

Love when I catch subtle (and maybe unintended) references to her other books--The 10th Circle

But In only existed because someone had drawn a line in the sand, so that everyone else was Out; and that line changed constantly. You might find yourself, through no fault of your own, suddenly standing on the wrong side.

Could you hate your son for what he had done, and still love him for who he had been?

You weren’t invincible when you were a teenager. You were just stupid.

Babies were always just the right weight, so that when you finally put them down, you felt like something was missing.

Maybe it was our own damn fault that men turned out the way they did, Selena thought. Maybe empathy, like any unused muscle, simply atrophied.

She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that Matt had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwitting animal that was well and truly caught, Josie could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.

What’s the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you’re faking.”

Q: Did you have the surprise ending in mind when you began writing Nineteen Minutes, or did it evolve later in the process? A: As with all my books, I knew the ending before I wrote the first word.