Jodi Picoult

In this new place we've found, sometimes there aren't words, because the truth can be even more difficult than the lies.

i know what it's like to wake up thinking you will be able to cast the people who play the starring roles in your life, only to realize that you have to watch it from the audience.

You fell in love with someone because of the tilt of his smile, or because he could make you laugh, or in this case, because he made you believe that you were the only one who could save him.

It was nice not having to be the one in control, for a little while. It was nice to be the one who was protected, instead of the one who'd been protecting eveyone else.

...when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.

Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's cart, and say, "Great. Maybe you can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.

If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.

There is a gulf as wide as an ocean between should and want, and I am drowning in it.

I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn't get past something like that, you got through it.

As a child, what I was missing was so much bigger to me than what I had. My mother-mythic, imaginary-was a deity and a superhero and a comfort all at once. If only I'd had her, surely, she would have been the answer to every problem; if only I'd had her , she would have been the cure for everything that ever had gone wrong in my life.

I don't know why it's called "getting lost." Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turnd to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected to be.

The nurses, I have already learned, are the ones who give us the answers we’re desperate for. Unlike the doctors, who fidget like they need to be somewhere else, the nurses patiently answer us as if we are the first set of parents to ever have this kind of meeting with them, instead of the thousandth.

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.

I'm telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they'd conclude that most people had children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn't one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren't very flattering.

When she smiles, it feels like the first warm day of March-- after an eternity of snow, when you suddenly remember how summer feels on the backs of your bare calves & in the part of your hair.

maybe there is more to a person than a body and a mind. maybe something else figures into the mix— not a soul, exactly, but a spirit that hints you might one day be greater, stronger than you are now. a promise; a potential.

But still, it looked completely natural, as if we had been kissing at the ends of sentences for ages, while the rest of the world was still hung up on punctuation.

A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it...You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.

You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.

But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone's expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut.