Jodi Picoult

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.

Life could take on any number of shapes while you were busy fighting your own demons. But if you were changing at the same rate as the person beside you, nothing else really mattered. You became each other's constant.

But there's an enormous difference between an audience that's watching you because they can't wait to see what comes next and an audience that's watching you because they're waiting for you to fail.

The bottom line in both cases is that people don't change; that no matter how charming you are and how fiercely you love, you cannot turn a person into something she's not.

My mother walks forward. She's crying, but there's a smile on her face. For God's sake, is it any wonder I can't ever understand what you people are feeling?

What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline crack.

It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's.

But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.

There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots s there are in the bright ones.

The first time she kissed me, I truly thought I'd had an aneurysm - my pulse was thundering so loud and my senses were exploding. This, I remember thinking, the only word I could hold on to in a sea of feelings.

Asking me to describe my son is like asking me to hold the ocean in a paper cup

When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

You'd think someone who'd been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside.

The English judged a person so that they'd be justified in casting her out. The Amish judged a person so that they'd be justified in welcoming her back. Where I'm from, if someone is accused of sinning, it's not so that others can place blame. It's so that the person can make amends and move on.

And in general, the residents of the town wondered why they all felt hollow just beneath the throat, the result of missing something they had never been able to name in the first place.

Shelby believed that love was like a solar eclipse - breathtakingly beautiful, absorbing, and capable of rendering you blind. She had not necessarily gone out of her way to avoid a relationship, but she hadn't wanted on either. It was called falling in love for a reason - because, inevitably, you crashed at the bottom.

Beliefs are the roads we take to our dreams. Believe you can do something-or believe you can't-and you'll be right everytime.

As it turned out, though, it was a lot easier to say that someone deserved to die for what they did than it was to take the responsibility to make that happen.

I am not a religious man. I have not attended a service for many years. But I do believe in God. My own practice of religion, you could say, it a nonpractice. I personally feel that it's just as worthy on a weekend to rake the lawns of an elderly neighbor or to climb a mountain and marvel at the beauty of this land we live in as it is to sing hosannas or go to Mass. In other words, I think every many finds his own church- and not all of them have four walls - Judge Haig (Page 399)

Someone real," I hear myself saying. "Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who's smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a symphony and start to cry, because he understands music can be too big for words. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone I want to talk to first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Someone I feel like I've known my whole life, even if I haven't.