Jodi Picoult
I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't write a series with the same character, and I couldn't write a romance novel over and over again that takes place at a different beach every year. That's not who I am.Collection: Beach
I have the most devoted and loyal following. I could probably type up my grocery list and they'd all want to read it. I love that they're willing to let me go wherever I need to go as an author, and they're happy to come along for the ride as the reader.Collection: Want
The ideas choose me, not the other way around.Collection: Ideas
If you had grown up with me, this is one of the things I would have tried to teach you: Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance.Collection: Love You
But there’s a part of me that wonders what it would be like to be the most important person to someone else, to always feel like you were missing a piece of yourself when he wasn’t near you.Collection: Missing
there was not much distinction between losing a friend and a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumph, and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside.Collection: Losing Friends
Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction.Collection: People
Why are terms of endearment always food? Honey, cookie, sugar, pumpkin. Its not like caring about someone is enough to actually sustain you.Collection: Caring
The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.Collection: World
I wonder if you've got a minute." I have many minutes, all of them used toward a common purpose.Collection: Common Purpose
She shrugged. "You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.Collection: Mean
If you're afraid of everyone leaving you, what do you do?" Make them stay." And if you can't do that, or don't know how to?" Ellie shrugged. "I don't know." Yes, you do. In fact, you've done it. You leave first," Coop said, "so you don't have to watch them walk away.Collection: Leaving
You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.' How?' Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.Collection: Thinking
when you [lose someone], it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all nerves are still a little rawCollection: Fall
The woman who opens the door has a blue stain on her shirt and dark hair wound into a messy knot and the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They're pale, like a lioness's, nearly golden, but they also look like they've done their fair share of crying, and we all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn't have any.Collection: Beautiful
How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?Collection: War
Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.Collection: Baby
I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.Collection: Suffering
Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.Collection: Knowing
It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else's. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party - a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.Collection: Party
It was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearable sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet.Collection: Sweet
When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn't contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.Collection: Simple
Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's.Collection: Wall
Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.Collection: Believe
I knew her well enough to understand that when Delia pushed you away, it was her way of making sure she didn't get shoved first.Collection: Way
I have no idea what Andrew might have done, and I do not ask. She believes that I can fix this, and like always, that's enough to make me think that I can. "I'll take care of it,: I say, when what I really mean is: I'll take care of you.Collection: Believe
You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.Collection: Thinking
If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.Collection: Believe
Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.Collection: Thinking
Perhaps he d always known that the truth of a person lies in the heart.Collection: Lying
There are always sides. There is always a winner and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.Collection: Giving
people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.Collection: Thinking
When I'm with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that's backing up.Collection: Moving
The joke's on them. One little hypodermic wont' be enough. Split a piece of wood, and they'll find me. Lift up a stone, and they'll find me. Look in the mirror, and they'll find me...If you really want to know what makes someone a killer, ask yourself what would make you do it.Collection: Mirrors
When you care more if someone else lives than you do about yourself- is that what [love is]?Collection: First Love
If there's something as good as [him] in my life, I'm going to pay for it.Collection: Pay
I don't know the first thing about holding together a family, especially one that resembles an heirloom vase, shattered but glued back together for its beauty, and no one mentions that you can see the cracks as plain as day.Collection: Together
Sara: "You are so brave," I tell her, and then I smile. "When I grow up, I want to be just like you." To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. "No Mommy," she says. "You'd be sick.Collection: Growing Up
As for his name, well, what attorney wouldn't want to be able put a Judge in a crate every now and then?Collection: Names
Here's what I hadn't realized: the mother you haven't seen for almost thirty-six years isn't your mother, she's a stranger. Sharing DNA doesn't make you fast friends. This wasn't a joyous reunion. It was just awkward.Collection: Mother
I have always written about subjects that engage me - questions I can't answer myself. They apparently tend to be big moral and ethical issues!Collection: Ethical Issues
There are certain things that I'll hear about and that I think will make a great book and I put it in a file. Sometimes it's a situation that interests me, and I don't even realize what I'm trying to say about it until I get closer to it. Sometimes the book after that I've written 125 pages of, and I can tell you what the book is after that. I just sort of have a linear progression, but more than anything, the topics land in your lap. I don't feel that I go out searching for them.Collection: Book
I can get 400 pages down the road and still not know the answer. What I do know is that I have really examined every facet of the situation, and I may not have changed my opinion but I have definitely forced myself to explore why it's my opinion.Collection: Answers
I keep quite busy, walk 5 miles a day, and have an excellent hairdresser who keeps the gray out of my red hair.Collection: Hair
In America right now, the people who talk about race the most are people of color - and if we are going to move the needle forward, it's WHITE people who need to acknowledge their role in racism.Collection: Moving
Life can change in an instant.Collection: Instant
The book that made me want to be a writer in the first place was Gone with the Wind - I read it and wanted to create a whole world out of words, too.Collection: Book
I think that different things sell in different countries.Collection: Country
Stem cell research has become such a polarizing issue in America... and I wanted to bring it down to the personal level, instead of the political.Collection: Issues