MJ > MJ's Quotes

“There is a magic to intimacy, a world built of sighs and skin that is thicker than brick, stronger than iron. There is only you, and him, so impossibly close that nothing can come between. Not the enemy, not your allies. In this safe haven, in this hallowed place and time, I could even ask the questions whose answers I feared.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“But that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“But if you seek forgiveness, doesn't that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn't that desperation make you human again?”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“If you say the same words over and over, do they become so bleached that there's no color left in them?”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“She became whoever she needed to be to survive,but she never let anyone else define her.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“There are so many ways to betray someone.
You can whisper behind his back.
You can deceive him on purpose.
You can deliver him into the hands of his enemy, when he trusts you.
You can break a promise.
The question is, if you do any of those things, are you also betraying yourself?”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“History isn’t about dates and places and wars. It’s about the people who fill the spaces between them.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“I believe in Hell...but it's here on earth." He shakes his head. "Good people and bad people. As if it were this easy. Everyone is both of these at once.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to potentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Loneliness is a mirror, and recognizes itself.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Be kind to others before you take care of yourself; make whoever you're with feel like they matter.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“The only monsters I have ever known were men.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“What he did was wrong. He doesn't deserve your love. But he does deserve your forgiveness, because otherwise he will grow like a weed in your heart until it's choked and overrun. The only person who suffers, when you squirrel away all that hate, is you.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“If history has a habit of repeating itself, doesn't someone have to stay behind to shout out a warning?”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Sometimes all you need to live one more day is a good reason to stick around.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets,lies,stories. We all tell them. Sometimes,because we hope to entertain. Sometimes,because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Even the most beautiful things can be toxic.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet?

Love isn't the only word that fails.

Hate does, too.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don't, how will they ever come to appreciate safety?”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“I don't believe in God. But sitting there, in a room full of those who feel otherwise, I realize that I do believe in people. In their strength to help each other, and to thrive in spite of the odds, I believe that the extraordinary trumps the ordinary, any day. I believe that having something to hope for -- even if it's just a better tomorrow -- is the most powerful drug on this planet.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“You would be surprised at the lengths you will go to believe the best about someone if you truly love him”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller