Change of Heart

by Jodi Picoult

In the space between yes and no, there’s a lifetime. It’s the difference between the path you walk and one you leave behind; it’s the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; it’s the legroom for the lies you’ll tell yourself in the future.

When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the one person who doesn’t.

I don’t think religions are based on lies, but I don’t think they’re based on truths, either. I think they come about because of what people need at the time that they need them.

That the sum of a man’s life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there.

And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

They say God won’t give you any more than you can handle, but that begs a more important question: why would God let you suffer in the first place?

For a long time after that, I believed my grandfather had it right: God was in the details.

Religion gave hope to people who knew the end wasn’t going to be pretty.

Religion was supposed to be a blanket drawn up to your chin to keep you warm, a promise that when it came to the end, you wouldn’t die alone—but it could just as easily leave you shivering out in the cold, if what you believed became more important than the fact that you believed.

in order to forgive, you have to remember how you were hurt in the first place. And that in order to forget, you had to accept your role in what had happened.

I was an atheist. Or so I told myself, even if there was a secret part of me that hoped I’d be proven wrong.

A man should live his life a certain way not because of some divine authority, but because of a personal moral obligation to himself and others.”

preach

somehow religion stopped being about trying to find honest solutions . . . and started being about ritual. Instead of everyone searching for understanding on their own, orthodox religion came along and said, ‘Do x, y, and z—and the world will be a better place.’”

America was founded on religious freedom, on the separation of church and state, and yet I will be the first to tell you that we’re not much better off than those Puritans were in the 1770s over in England.

“This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”