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Nobody Wants To Admit To This, But Bad Things Will Keep On Happening. Maybe That's Beause It's All A Chain, And A Long Time Ago Someone Did The First Bad Thing, And That Led Someone Else To Do Another Bad Thing, And So On. You Know, Like That Game Where You Whisper A Sentence Into Someone's Ear, And That Person Whispers It To Someone Else, And It All Comes Out Wrong In The End. But Then Again, Maybe Bad Things Happen Because It's The Only Way We Can Keep Remembering What Good Is Supposed To Look Like.

-Jodi Picoult

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Nobody Wants To Admit

Jodi Picoult

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Nobody Wants To Admit To This, But Bad Things Will Keep On Happening. Maybe That's Beause It's All A Chain, And A Long Time Ago Someone Did The First Bad Thing, And That Led Someone Else To Do Another Bad Thing, And So On. You Know, Like That Game Where You Whisper A Sentence Into Someone's Ear, And That Person Whispers It To Someone Else, And It All Comes Out Wrong In The End. But Then Again, Maybe Bad Things Happen Because It's The Only Way We Can Keep Remembering What Good Is Supposed To Look Like.

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Mom And Daughter

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I Personally Subscribe To The Belief That Normal Is Just A Setting On The Dryer.

If There Isn’t A Them, There Can’t Be An Us.

Turn Around, And The People You Thought You Knew Might Change. Your Little Boy Might Now Live Half A World Away. Your Beautiful Daughter Might Be Sneaking Out At Night. Your Ex-husband Might By Dying By Degrees. This Is The Reason That Dancers Learn, Early On, How To Spot While Doing Pirouettes: We All Want To Be Able To Find The Place Where We Started.

It's The Child Who's Supposed To Cry, And The Mom Who Makes It All Better, Not The Other Way Around, Which Is Why Mothers Will Move Heaven And Earth To Hold It Together In Front Of Their Own Kids.

If You Think Of A Relationship As A Living Entity, I Guess It's One Thing If The Missing Two Percent Is, Like, A Fingernail. But When It's The Heart, That's A Whole Different Ball Of Wax.

Love Was That Way. You Could Not Render It In Black Or White. It Always Came Down To The Strange, Blended Shades Of Grey.

On The Surface, We're Polar Opposites. Under The Skin, Though, We're The Same: People Think They Know What They're Getting, And They're Always Wrong.

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.

Or In Other Words, It's The Substance You've Got When You Start That Determines The Outcome.

Maybe I Was Naïve To Think That Silence Was Implicit Complacence, Instead Of A Festering Question. Maybe I Was Silly To Believe That Friends Owed Each Other Anything.

I Write Adult Fiction, But A Good 40 To 50 Per Cent Of My Readers Are Teenagers. I Love That If They Have To Grow Up And Move Past Jk Rowling They Can Move To Me. From Jo To Jodi!

Forgiveness Is Spiritual. Punishment Is Legal," Leo Says. "they're Not Mutually Exclusive.

I Think Her Flaws Make Me Love Her Even More. She's Not Perfect, But She's Perfect To Me

You Keep Distracting Me,” I Tell Her. “all I’m Doing Is Sitting Here Talking To You!” “exactly,” I Say, And I Smile At Her.j

Some Women Are Meant To Change The World While Others Are Meant To Hold It Together.

Changing The World

Objection!" Metz Shouts. Grounds?" The Judge Asks. Well...he's My Witness!

And The Very Act Of Living Is A Tide; At First It Seems To Make No Difference At All, And Then One Day You Look Down And See How Much Pain Has Eroded

Loneliness Is A Mirror, And Recognizes Itself.

There Had Been So Many Easy Words Between Them That Daniel Was Guilty Of Nodding Every Now And Then And Tuning Out The Excess. He Hadn't Known, At The Time, That He Should Have Been Hoarding These, Like Bits Of Sea Glass Hidden In The Pocket Of A Winter Coat To Remind Him That Once It Had Been Summer.

And Just Like That, Something Inside Shifted Very Subtly, So That All The Empty Spaces In Him Suddenly Disappeared, So That His Breath Timed To Hers, So That His Blood Sang. This Is Why There Was Music, He Realized. There Were Some Feelings That Just Didn’t Have Words Big Enough To Describe Them.

There's Something Nice About Knowing That I'm Not The Only One Who Doesn't Quite Fit The Part.

One Person's Trauma Is Another's Loss Of Innocence.

She Shrugged. "you Can Be Happy For Someone Else's Good Fortune, But That Doesn't Mean You Forget Your Own Bad Luck.

Things Break All The Time. Glass And Dishes And Fingernails. Cars And Contracts And Potato Chips. You Can Break A Record, A Horse, A Dollar. You Can Break The Ice. There Are Coffee Breaks And Lunch Breaks And Prison Breaks. Day Breaks, Waves Break, Voices Break. Chains Can Be Broken. So Can Silence, And Fever... Promises Break. Hearts Break.

Instead Of Plotting The Demise Of The Traditional Family, As Some Politicians And Religious Leaders Would Have You Believe, Gay People Mow Their Lawns And Watch 'american Idol' And Video Their Children's Concerts And Have The Same Hopes And Dreams That Their Straight Counterparts Do.

A Sacrament--like Marriage--means Living A Life Better Than Your Natural Instincts, So That You're Modeling God. And God Never Gives Up.

We'd Sit With A Big Bowl Of Popcorn, Wrapped Together In A Queen-size Blanket, And Would Escape To A Place Where Magic Was Ours For The Taking, Where Men Rescued The People They Loved Instead Of Abandoning Them. A Place Where, No Matter How Bad Things Looked At That Moment, There Would Always Be A Happy Ending.

Tutoring A Four Year Old To Get Into An Exclusive Preschool Made As Much Sense As Hiring A Swim Coach For A Guppy.

Can You Imagine What It Would Be Like To Know That Your Life Was Just Going To Be A Series Of Days That Were All The Same, That Were Do-overs?

Iknew That All The Attributes He Was Teased For, At Age Five, Were Going To Work In His Favor By Thetime He Was Thirty-five...but I Couldn't Get Him There Overnight. You Can't Fast-forward Your Child'slife, No Matter How Much You Want To.

When Someone Loves You Up One Side And Down The Other Like That, You Make Every Effort To Stick Around.

Lately, I Have Been Having Nightmares, Where I'm Cut Into So Many Pieces That There Isn't Enough Of Me To Be Put Back Together.

There's A Lot Of Things You Can't See If You Aren't' Looking.

I Knew That Somewhere God Was Laughing. He Had Taken The Other Half Of My Heart, The One Person Who Knew Me Better Than I Knew Myself, And He Had Done What Nothing Else Could Do. By Bringing Us Together, He Had Set Into Motion The One Thing That Could Tear Us Apart.

Do You Know How, When You Are On The Verge Of A Breakdown, The World Pounds In Your Ears; A Rush Of Blood, Of Consequence? Do You Now How It Feels When The Truth Cuts Your Tongue To Ribbons, And Still You Have To Speak It?

If You End Your Story, It's A Static Work Of Art, A Finite Circle. But If You Don't, It Belongs To Anyone's Imagination. It Stays Alive Forever.

I Think That's Probably The Most Devastating Thing - When Someone Who Is Larger Than Life Winds Up A Shadow Of Themselves In A Hospital Bed.

Africa - You Can See A Sunset And Believe You Have Witnessed The Hand Of God. You Watch The Slope Lope Of A Lioness And Forget To Breathe. You Marvel At The Tripod Of A Giraffe Bent To Water. In Africa, There Are Iridescent Blues On The Wings Of Birds That You Do Not See Anywhere Else In Nature. In Africa, In The Midday Heart, You Can See Blisters In The Atmosphere. When You Are In Africa, You Feel Primordial, Rocked In The Cradle Of The World.

A Real Friend Isn't Capable Of Feeling Sorry For You.

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