Elyse > Elyse's Quotes

“Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong. ”
― Jodi Picoult

“Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.”
― Jodi Picoult, Perfect Match

“When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound.
You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart.
You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like. ”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?”
― Jodi Picoult

“Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?”
― Jodi Picoult, Mercy

“As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“You couldn't have strength without weakness, you couldn't have light without dark, you couldn't have love without loss”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's beause it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on.

You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone's ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end.

But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.”
― Jodi Picoult

“There are always sides. There is always a winner and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give. ”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“It took me a lifetime to realizethings don't get lost if they don't have value- you don't miss what you don't care about.”
― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

“Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.”
― Jodi Picoult

“Change is a funny thing. We never are quite sure what we are becoming or even why. Then one day we look at ourselves and wonder who we are and how we got that way. Only one thing about change remains constant...it is always painful”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.”
― Jodi Picoult, Second Glance

“If it had been easy for Romeo to get to Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up.”
― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

“Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Shooting stars are not stars at all. They re just rocks that enter the atmosphere and catch fire under friction. What we wish on when we see one is only a trail of debris.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.”
― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

“And the very act of living is a tide; at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“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 person who doesn't.”
― Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

“Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.”
― Jodi Picoult, Keeping Faith

“I know you love me. The question is, how much?”
― Jodi Picoult

“Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.”
― Jodi Picoult

“If I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.

Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder.. But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.

The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding onto whatever scraps she had left.”
― Jodi Picoult

“Just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.”
― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts