Jodi Picoult

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?

Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way.

I, um, I have this problem. I broke up with my boyfriend, you see. And I'm pretty upset about it, so I wanted to talk to my best friend. [...] The thing is, they're both you.

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.

I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.

Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.

And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

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.

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.

You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.

So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.

See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it

The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we're supposed to.

If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.