Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.
Jodi PicoultRead
It feels like a punch. Tears fill my eyes, and I wonder how I could be upset over losing something I never had.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the pain of loss despite never having truly possessed what was lost.
In this quote, Jodi Picoult captures the emotional turmoil of experiencing grief or sadness over an unattainable or imagined connection. It reveals how deep desires and the hope of what could have been can evoke powerful feelings of loss, even when the relationship or situation was never fully realized.
In practice
In a speech about the complexities of love and its discontents.
Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.
Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.
she told me she'd be a phoenix." The image of the mythical creature rising from the ashes glitters in my mind. "They don't really exist." "She said that depends on whether or not there's someone who can see them.
for 100,000 (dollars), you [can] flatten a house with a wrecking ball. Imagine how much less it [takes] to destroy something than it [does] to build it in the first place.
But if you seek forgiveness, doesn't that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn't that desperation make you human again?
when you [lose someone], it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all nerves are still a little raw
It's amazing that people still feel, 'Oh my gosh, it's a black guy.' We've been here for a long time; let's get used to it. Let's get used to other cultures.
But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.
Be very disciplined about dedicating some time - even if it is five minutes a day - to calling or talking to someone you love. That kind of consistency, even if it is just five minutes a day, helps to remind us that we have a well of connection in our lives.
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.
There are people who can walk away from you... let them walk. I don't want you to try to talk another person into staying with you, loving you, calling you, caring about you, coming to see you, staying attached to you... Your destiny is never tied to anybody that left. And it doesn't mean that they are a bad person, it just means that their part in the story is over. And you've got to know when people's part in your story is over.
Our creation is the modification of relationship.
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