A Spark of Light Quotes

“We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Laws are black and white. The lives of women are a thousand shades of gray.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Your religion should help you make the decision if you find yourself in that situation, but the policy should exist for you to have the right to make it in the first place.

When you say you can't do something because your religion forbids it, that's a good thing. When you say I can't do something because YOUR religion forbids it, that's a problem.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“You don’t look at another person’s plate to see if they have more than you. You look to see if they have enough.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Coal, with time and heat and pressure, will always become a diamond. But if you were freezing to death, which would you consider the gem?”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“this was indeed some crazy world, where the waiting period to get an abortion was longer than the waiting period to get a gun.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“This is what it means to be human. We are all just canvases for our scars.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“There was such art in the ordinary, it could leave you in tears.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Parenthood was like awakening to find a soap bubble in the cup of your palm, and being told you had to carry it while you parachuted from a dizzying height, climbed a mountain range, battled on the front lines. All you wanted to do was tuck it away, safe from natural disasters and violence and prejudice and sarcasm, but that was not an option. You lived in daily fear of watching it burst, of breaking it yourself. Somehow you knew that if it disappeared, you would, too.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? —REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“If we are meant to only have children who never encounter difficulty in life, then no one should be born.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Violence, from one angle, looked like mercy from another.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“And naturally she wanted to believe she would have been a hero, when push came to shove. But you never knew what path you'd take until you got to that crossroads.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“She had come to the clinic because she didn't want to be a little girl anymore. But it wasn't having sex that made you a woman. It was having to make decisions, sometimes terrible ones. Children were told what to do. Adults made up their own minds, even when the options tore them apart.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“But we can’t make policies based on religion when religion means different things to different people. Which leaves science. The science of reproduction is what it is. Conception is conception. You can decide the ethical value that has for you, based on your own relationship with God…but the policies around basic human rights with regard to reproduction shouldn’t be up for interpretation.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Heroes did not always swoop in to rescue. They made questionable calls. They lived with doubts. They replayed and edited and imagined different outcomes. They killed, sometimes, to save.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“The vast majority of protesters were men, and it made perfect sense to Louie—the male of the species felt threatened by the biology of women. Even in the Bible, normal female biological functions were made pathological: You were unclean when you had your menses. Childbirth had to occur in pain. And there was the questionable nature of those who bled regularly—but did not die. There was, of course, the history, too. Women had been property. Their chastity had always belonged to a man, until abortion and contraception put control of women’s sexuality in the women’s hands. If women could have sex without the fear of unwanted pregnancy, then suddenly the man’s role had shrunk to a level somewhere between unnecessary and vestigial. So instead, men vilified women who had abortions. They created the stigma: good women want to be mothers, bad women don’t.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Sometimes you can’t tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence. Sometimes you can’t recognize love because it’s changed you, like a chimera, so slowly that you didn’t witness the transformation.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Catholics believed in life at conception. Muslims believed that it took forty-two days after conception for Allah to send an angel to transform sperm and egg into something alive...There were the outliers, too—the ancient Greeks, who said that a fetus had a “vegetable” soul, and the Jews, who said that the soul came at birth….Still, it didn’t really make sense, did it? How could the moment that life began differ so much, depending on the point of view? How could the law in Mississippi say that an embryo was a human being, but the law in Massachusetts disagreed?”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Louie believed that those white men with their signs and slogans were not really there for the unborn, but there for the women who carried them. They couldn’t control women’s sexual independence. To them, this was the next best thing.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Vonita, God rest her soul, used to say that if men were the ones to get pregnant, abortion would probably be a sacrament. The Super Bowl halftime show would celebrate it. Men who had terminated pregnancies would be asked to stand and be applauded at church for the courage to make that decision. Viagra would be sold with a coupon for three free abortions.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“No matter how many times you let someone go, it never got any easier.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“The brain can do a lot of things, Olive said, but it can't distinguish between what's really happening and what you're imagining. That's why scary movies scare you and why you cry at Nicholas Sparks books.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Sometimes you can't tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Whether or not you believed a fetus was a human being, there was no question in anyone’s mind that a grown woman was one. Even if you placed moral value on that fetus, you couldn’t give it rights unless they were stripped away from the woman carrying it. Perhaps the question wasn’t When does a fetus become a person? but When does a woman stop being one?”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“You don’t know what you don’t know,”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“It felt like the stamp of a passport when you reached your own country, and realized that the only reason you’d traveled was to remember the feeling of home.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Louie’s final thought before he passed out was that this was indeed some crazy world, where the waiting period to get an abortion was longer than the waiting period to get a gun.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“The reason you hold on to someone too tightly isn’t always to protect them—sometimes it’s to protect yourself.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“The Center had suffered scars from the cuts of politicians and the barbs of protesters. It had licked its wounds and healed. At one point it had been called the Center for Women and Reproductive Health. But there were those who believed if you do not name a thing, it ceases to exist, and so its title was amputated, like a war injury. But still, it survived. First it became the Center for Women. And then, just: the Center.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light