Top 500 Jodi Picoult Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else’s. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party – a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.”

— Jodi Picoult

452. “You didn’t get past something like that, you go through it – and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.”

— Jodi Picoult

453. “This is when I realize that Anna has already left the table, and more importantly, that nobody noticed.”

— Jodi Picoult

454. “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?”

— Jodi Picoult

455. “Beliefs are the roads we take to our dreams. Believe you can do something-or believe you can’t-and you’ll be right everytime.”

— Jodi Picoult

456. “I don’t believe in writer’s block. Think about it – when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn’t it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer’s block is having too much time on your hands.”

— Jodi Picoult

457. “Babies are such blank slates. They don’t come into this world with the assumptions their parents have made, or the promises their church will give, or the ability to sort people into groups they like and don’t like. They don’t come into this world with anything, really, except a need for comfort. And they will take it from anyone, without judging the giver. I wonder how long it takes before the polish given by nature gets worn off by nurture.”

— Jodi Picoult

458. “The Lord turned water into wine. All I’m suggesting is a trip to the grocery store.”

— Jodi Picoult

459. “The Japanese believe that it takes three generations to forget. Those who experience a trauma pass it along to their children and their grandchildren, and then the memory fades.”

— Jodi Picoult

460. “I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgotten by most everyone.”

— Jodi Picoult

461. “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.”

— Jodi Picoult

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

462. “Forgiving isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. It’s saying, You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me. It’s saying, You don’t get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.”

— Jodi Picoult

463. “I would prove to you that being different isn’t a death sentence but a call to arms.”

— Jodi Picoult

464. “Once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?”

— Jodi Picoult

465. “Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it’s there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.”

— Jodi Picoult

466. “You can’t hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.”

— Jodi Picoult

467. “What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you’d never forget?”

— Jodi Picoult

468. “You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed – the length of a sleeping baby’s eyelash, the span of a child’s hand. Life turns on a dime, and – it turns out – so does one’s conscience.”

— Jodi Picoult

469. “I once heard someone on a bus say that this guy had gotten under her skin. And it struck me as a remarkable thought – that someone would affect you so deeply they’d always be a part of you.”

— Jodi Picoult

470. “How do you walk into someone’s life again after twenty-eight years? How do you pick up, when you were too young to know where you left off.”

— Jodi Picoult

471. “By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.”

— Jodi Picoult

472. “From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest. Darkness, you know, is relative.”

— Jodi Picoult

473. “There was, really, nothing you could use as a blueprint for your life, except your past. There was no starting over. There was only picking up the pieces someone had left behind.”

— Jodi Picoult

474. “I love her. I love her to death.” “You love her through death,” I correct gently. “You don’t stop loving someone just because they’re not physically with you.”

— Jodi Picoult

475. “You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you’ve got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you’re making a mistake.”

— Jodi Picoult

476. “What if love wasn’t the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?”

— Jodi Picoult

477. “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?”

— Jodi Picoult

478. “Since I was five, I’ve known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one’s own origins.”

— Jodi Picoult

479. “There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.”

— Jodi Picoult

480. “How similar does someone have to be to you before you remember to see them, first, as human?”

— Jodi Picoult

481. “Close a door, and you’d still feel a breeze through the window.”

— Jodi Picoult

482. “There’s a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It’s when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question though, is why? I think part of it is self preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it’s banded together against an enemy. It doesn’t matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself.”

— Jodi Picoult

483. “I know that the first person I kissed won’t be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.”

— Jodi Picoult

484. “People ask all the time how I’m doing, but the truth is, they don’t really want to know.”

— Jodi Picoult

485. “A pirate walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder, a peg leg, and a steering wheel on his pants,” Derek said. “The bartender says, ‘Hey, you’ve got a steering wheel on your pants.’ And the pirate goes, ‘Arrrgh, I know. It’s driving me nuts.”

— Jodi Picoult

486. “The jury is supposed to be twelve peers, but technically that would mean every single person on the jury should have Asperger’s syndrome, because then they’d really understand me.”

— Jodi Picoult

487. “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.”

— Jodi Picoult

488. “Frankly, I wonder who Frank was, and why he has an adverb all to himself.”

— Jodi Picoult

489. “I don’t know why it’s called “getting lost.” Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turnd to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn’t where you expected to be.”

— Jodi Picoult

490. “When you’re a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim.”

— Jodi Picoult

491. “Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.”

— Jodi Picoult

492. “Being a parent wasn’t just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.”

— Jodi Picoult

493. “It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t.”

— Jodi Picoult

494. “In fairytales, when the mask came off, the handsome prince still loved the girl, no matter what -and that alone would turn her into a princess.”

— Jodi Picoult

495. “The reason I am still sitting at Josef’s kitchen table is the same reason traffic slows after a car wreck- you want to see the damage; you can’t let yourself pass without that mental snapshot. We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it.”

— Jodi Picoult

496. “It is strange to think that we might have crossed paths, and still not have known what we were missing.”

— Jodi Picoult

497. “Isn’t it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?”

— Jodi Picoult

498. “It’s silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.”

— Jodi Picoult

499. “She stares at me for a moment, and then she bursts out laughing. “You haven’t seen his perfect little wife and his perfect little girls. Believe me, Oliver, I’m not the great love of his life, the one he’ll never forget.” “You are to me,” I say.”

— Jodi Picoult

500. “Hunger, she often tells me, has nothing to do with the belly and everything to do with the mind. What Mary really runs isn’t a bakery, but a community.”

— Jodi Picoult