1,824 Quotes by Jodi Picoult

If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.

But it feels like we are sitting on a tight bench of a bus with a stranger between us, one that neither of us is willing to admit to or mention, and so we find ourselves talking around him and through him and sneaking glances when the other one isn't looking. How am I supposed to think about Anna Fitzgerald when I'm wondering whether Julia has ever woken up in someone's arms and for just a moment, before the sleep cleared from her mind, thought maybe it was me?

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were?

Do you know what it's like to love someone so much, that you can't see yourself without picturing her? Or what it's like to touch someone, and feel like you've come home? What we had wasn't about sex, or about being with someone just to show off what you've got, the way it was for other kids our age. We were, well, meant to be together. Some people spend their whole lives looking for that one person. I was lucky enough to have her all along.

Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow-beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don’t like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn’t speak that language. They didn’t learn it as children and they didn’t manage to pick it up as adults, either.

Any highway . . . they all take you to the same place, don't they?

That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes.I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.”“Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events.“So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.” “Huh?” I say.