Mad Honey

by Jodi Picoult

“I’m not a hero,” I told my mother. “I’m just somebody who finally figured out how to stop being sad.”

That’s a piece of his life I won’t ever have, and sometimes, I am so hungry for the parts of him that I don’t know yet I feel like I’ve been starving for decades and he’s a feast.

What do you do when you really need to talk to someone about your boyfriend, and your boyfriend is the person you want to talk to him about?

Imagine a sorrow so deep that it batters the hatches of sleep; imagine drowning before you even realize you’ve gone under.

you don’t ever recover from losing someone you love—even the ones you leave behind because you’re better off without them.

I think about how you never realize how empty you feel until you are filled. Then I stop thinking at all.

it’s like he’s a flower in a field and I’m a strange rain he just wants to drink in.

The judge sounds bored. Tired. As if his entire

life has not suddenly come apart at the seams, the way ours have. If you do this long enough, I wonder, do you even notice that the people in front of you are falling to pieces?

IF YOU ASKED ME, I’d tell you I’m a fundamentally happy person, someone whose heart is capable of big leaps in the air. Which is a weird thing to say, actually, considering how much of my life I’ve spent depressed.

People always talk about how their love for you is unconditional. Then you reveal your most private self to them, and you find out how many conditions there are in unconditional love.

I keep trying to be an atheist, but it just won’t take. In spite of how much garbage there is in the Bible—like all the instructions on how to treat your slaves, and how women should pretty much accept that we’re destined to be the property of men—there is still something about faith that I cannot let go of. I do not know what this world is, but I know that it contains miracles that I cannot explain, and the love that people have for each other is the biggest mystery of all.

there’s a way in which I feel more like myself when I’m with him than when I’m alone.

It was the first time I realized that you can cut someone out of your life, but that doesn’t mean they’ll cut you out of theirs.