Jodi Picoult

The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies

There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations

and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

When you love someone you let them take care of you.

He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable

I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.

This is love, I think. A place where people who have been alone may lock together like hawks and spin in the air, dizzy with surprise at the connection. A place you go willingly, and with wonder

Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.

What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.

What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?

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.

Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.

When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires