Jodi Picoult

“Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.”

“well, sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.”

“My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.”

“It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place--because we become better people in it.”

“He's an egotistical dickhead who's going to chew you up and spit you out; and you have a really awful history of falling for assholes that you ought to run screaming from; and I don't feel like sitting around listening to you try to convince yourself you don't still feel something for Campbell Alexander when, in fact, you've spent the past fifteen years trying to fill in the hole he made inside you.”

“You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it’s a catch-22: all of those things that you’re willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you've lost yourself.”

“I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.”

“I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.”

“Some women are meant to change the world, while others are meant to hold it together. And then there are those of us who simply don't want to be in it, because we know no matter how much we struggle, we can't comfortably fit.”

“There's a problem with wounded birds, Cassie," Connor said. "Either they fly away from you one day, or else they never get better. They stay hurt no matter what you do.”

“and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.”

“The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies”

“In the past, even Alex's promises hadn't prevented a reoccurence. She didn't have a choice. She wished he could see that as clearly as she did.”

“She sobbed the way she did everything else- with passion and excess.”

“Home is not a place, but rather, the people who love you.”

“People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.”

“I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.”

“There are all sorts of losses people suffer - from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.”

“I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.”

“You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.”