“Here's my question: What age are you when you're in Heaven? I mean, if it's Heaven, you should be at your beauty-queen best, and I doubt that all the people who die of old age are wandering around toothless and bald. It opens up a whole additional realm of questions, too. If you hang yourself, do you walk around all gross and blue, with your tongue spitting out of your mouth? If you are killed in a war, do you spend eternity minus the leg that got blown up by a mine?I figure that maybe you get a choice. You fill out the application form that asks you if you want a star view or a cloud view, if you like chicken or fish or manna for dinner, what age you'd like to be seen as by everyone else. Like me, for example, I might pick seventeen, in the hopes I grow boobs by then, and even if I'm a pruny centegenarian by the time I die, in Heaven, I'd be young and pretty.Once at a dinner party I heard my father say that even though he was old old old, in his heart he was twenty-one. So maybe there is a place in your life you ear out like a rut, or even better, like the soft spot on the couch. And no matter what else happens to you, you come back to that.The problem, I suppose, is that everyone's different. What happens in Heaven when all these people are trying to find each other after so many years spent apart? Say that you die and start looking around for your husband, who died five years ago. what if you're picturing him at seventy, but he hit his groove at sixteen and is wandering around suave as can be?Or what if you're Kate, and you die at sixteen, but in Heaven you choose to look thirty-five, an age you never got to be here on Earth. How would anyone ever be able to find you?”

Share & Save

Meaning

Not documented yet.

When It Was Said

Not documented yet.

Who It Was Said To

Not documented yet.

Historical Context

Not documented yet.

Source

Not documented yet.

Original Language & Translation

Originally said in English.

Did They Really Say It?

Not documented yet.

Did You Know?

Not documented yet.

About Jodi Picoult

American writer

Jodi Picoult is an American writer. By 2026, she has published 30 novels and several short stories, and she has also written several issues of Wonder Woman. Her books have sold widely, with about 40 million copies in print worldwide and translations into 34 languages. She is also the recipient of the 2003 New England Bookseller Award for fiction. Her work appears in both long-form fiction and shorter pieces, and it has reached a broad international readership.

More from Jodi Picoult (410 quotes) →

READ THE SOURCE

Books by Jodi Picoult

My Sister's Keeper

2005

VIEW ON AMAZON

Nineteen Minutes

2007

VIEW ON AMAZON

Wish You Were Here

2021

VIEW ON AMAZON

The Tenth Circle

2006

VIEW ON AMAZON

Perfect Match

2003

VIEW ON AMAZON