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There Are Stars In The Night Sky That Look Brighter Than The Others, And When You Look At Them Through A Telescope You Realize You Are Looking At Twins. The Two Stars Rotate Around Each Other, Sometimes Taking Nearly A Hundred Years To Do It. They Create So Much Gravitational Pull There's No Room Around For Anything Else. You Might See A Blue Star, For Example, And Realize Only Later That It Has A White Dwarf As A Companion - That First One Shines So Bright, By The Time You Notice The Second One, It's Too Late.

-Jodi Picoult

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There Are Stars In

Jodi Picoult

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There Are Stars In The Night Sky That Look Brighter Than The Others, And When You Look At Them Through A Telescope You Realize You Are Looking At Twins. The Two Stars Rotate Around Each Other, Sometimes Taking Nearly A Hundred Years To Do It. They Create So Much Gravitational Pull There's No Room Around For Anything Else. You Might See A Blue Star, For Example, And Realize Only Later That It Has A White Dwarf As A Companion - That First One Shines So Bright, By The Time You Notice The Second One, It's Too Late.

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How Can You Be A Survivor, When You Can't Even Remember The War?

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Why Are You Doing This To Yourself? When Something Bad Happens, Why Do You Have To Pick At It Until It Bleeds All Over Again?

I Don't Understand Why It's A Sin If You Love Something And Want To Keep It From Having To Suffer.

I Wonder If The Conversations You've Never Had With Someone Count, If You've Been Over Them A Thousand Times In Your Mind.

Because Hate's Just The Flip Side Of Love. Like Heads And Tails On A Dime. If You Don't Know What It Feels Like To Love Someone, How Would You Know What Hate Is? One Can't Exist Without The Other.

Be A Good Listener, Don't Judge And Don't Put Boundaries On Someone Else's Grief.

Do You Fix A Wheel That Isn't Broken, Or Do You Wait Until The Cart Collapses?

We Believe What We Want To, What We Need To. The Corollary Is That We Choose Not To See What We'd Rather Pretend Doesn't Exist.

For Someone Who Can’t Remember Very Much, There Seems To Be A Lot I Can’t Forget.

To Me, A Good Event Is Governed By The Audience.

I Could Tell Her From Personal Experience That 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. But All This Took Me A Lifetime To Discover, And Where Has It Gotten Me?... Some Lessons Can't Be Taught, They Simply Have To Be Learned.

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

Things Don't Always Look As They Seem.

I Know How Difficult It Can Be When The Image You've Had Of Something Doesn't Match Its Reality; When The Friend Beside You Turns Into A Monster.

Sometimes We Find Ourselves Walking Through Life Blindfolded, And We Try To Deny That We're The Ones Who Securely Tied The Knot.

Walking Through Life

If You Had Grown Up With Me, This Is One Of The Things I Would Have Tried To Teach You: Marry A Man Who Loves You More Than You Love Him. Because I Have Both Now, And When It Is The Other Way Around, There Is No Spell In The World That Can Even Out The Balance.

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

Or. I Hate That Word. It’s Two Letters Long And Stuffed To The Gills With Reasonable Doubt.

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.

No Child Really Chooses His Religion; It Is Just The Luck Of The Draw Which Blanket Of Beliefs You Are Wrapped In.

A Lot Of The Hallmark Behaviors Of Autism - Flat Affect, Stimming, Not Looking Someone In The Eye - Could Very Easily Be Misinterpreted As Signs Of Guilt.

Like Connor, Alex Protected Me -and He Was The Only Person I Let Close Enough To Do It. Like Connor, Alex Could Finish My Sentences Before I Did. But Unlike Connor, For Whom I Had Ultimately Come Too Late, I Was Just In Time To Take Care Of Alex.

You Don't Love Someone Because They're Perfect," She Says. "you Love Them In Spite Of The Fact That They're Not." I Don't Know How To Respond To That; It's Like Being Told After Thirty-five Years That The Sky, Which I've Seen As A Brilliant Blue, Is In Fact Rather Green.

At 17, The Smallest Crises Took On Tremendous Proportions; Someone Else's Thoughts Could Take Root In The Loam Of Your Own Mind; Having Someone Accept You Was As Vital As Oxygen. Adults, Light Years Away From This, Rolled Their Eyes And Smirked And Said, 'this Too Shall Pass' - As If Adolescence Was A Disease Like Chicken Pox, Something Everyone Recalled As A Milk Nuisance, Completely Forgetting How Painful It Had Been At The Time.

It Doesn't Matter What It Is That Leaves A Hole Inside You. It Just Matters That It’s There.

Just Because You Keep Something A Secret Doesn't Mean It Never Happened, No Matter How Much You Want That To Be True.

When I Was Little, The Great Mystery To Me Was Not How Babies Were Made, But Why?

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