Top 500 Jodi Picoult Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “You could only save someone that wanted to be saved; otherwise, you’d be be dragged down for the count, too.”

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “After fifteen years, love isn’t just a feeling,” he says. “It’s a choice.”

— Jodi Picoult

458. “I realize how quickly lies compound. They cover like a coat of paint, one on top of the other, until you cannot remember what color you started with.”

— Jodi Picoult

459. “Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.”

— Jodi Picoult

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

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

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

465. “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

466. “Maybe honesty is overvalued. What’s truly priceless is picking out from a stream of falsehoods the ones you most need to hear.”

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

468. “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

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

— Jodi Picoult

470. “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

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

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

474. “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

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

— Jodi Picoult

476. “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

477. “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.”

— Jodi Picoult

478. “She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else – with passion and excess.”

— Jodi Picoult

479. “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

480. “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

481. “In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do.”

— Jodi Picoult

482. “When heaven breaks, who fixes it?”

— Jodi Picoult

483. “You can fool yourself, you know. You’d think it’s impossible, but it turns out it’s the easiest thing of all.”

— Jodi Picoult

484. “No child really chooses his religion; it is just the luck of the draw which blanket of beliefs you are wrapped in.”

— Jodi Picoult

485. “It’s certainly my honor to be able to, hopefully, change the world a tiny bit, one mind at a time.”

— Jodi Picoult

486. “Mistakes are something that happen by accident. You didn’t walk out the door one morning and fall into some guy’s bed. You thought about it, for a while. You made that choice.”

— Jodi Picoult

487. “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

488. “Do you know how sometimes – when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs – you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?”

— Jodi Picoult

489. “There are some weapons you can’t protect yourself against.”

— 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. “The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn’t yet been slammed in your face.”

— Jodi Picoult

492. “There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you.”

— Jodi Picoult

493. “The whole panorama makes me realize how small I am, in the grand scheme of things. How insignificant my problems are when you zoom out and out and out and see the whole of the world.”

— Jodi Picoult

494. “And I think, not for the first time, that what is immoral is not always wrong.”

— Jodi Picoult

495. “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

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

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

498. “Does fate ever play by the rules?”

— Jodi Picoult

499. “Lies were only as strong as the suckers that believed them.”

— Jodi Picoult

500. “I closed my eyes and curled my fists around the things I knew for sure: That a scallop has thirty-five eyes, all blue. That a tuna will suffocate if it ever stops swimming. That I was loved. That this time, it was not me who broke.”

— Jodi Picoult