Top 500 Jodi Picoult Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “You make yourself strong because it’s expected of you. You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be.”

— Jodi Picoult

102. “If his voice hasn’t been the melody of my life, it’s been the bass line, so subtle you don’t notice it until it’s missing.”

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

104. “I believe that having something to hope for – even if it’s just a better tomorrow- is the most powerful drug on this planet.”

— Jodi Picoult

105. “Life was what happened when all the what-ifs didn’t.”

— Jodi Picoult

106. “Believe me, being gay is not a choice. No one would choose to make life harder than it has to be.”

— Jodi Picoult

107. “That’s what happens to dreams, life gets in the way.”

— Jodi Picoult

108. “Things that break – be they bones, hearts, or promises – can be put back together but will never really be whole.”

— Jodi Picoult

109. “After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken.”

— Jodi Picoult

110. “There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.”

— Jodi Picoult

111. “What if it turns out that a life isn’t defined by who you belong to or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you’ve lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next?”

— Jodi Picoult

112. “Things had a way of working out for the best when you let them run their course.”

— Jodi Picoult

113. “The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.”

— Jodi Picoult

114. “You couldn’t have strength without weakness, you couldn’t have light without dark, you couldn’t have love without loss.”

— Jodi Picoult

115. “Remember when you were a little kid and you’d fall asleep in the car? And someone would carry you out and put you into bed, so that when you woke up in the morning, you knew automatically you were home again? That’s what I think it’s like to die.”

— Jodi Picoult

116. “Raw love, like raw heartache, could blindside you.”

— Jodi Picoult

117. “If you ask me, music is the language of memory.”

— Jodi Picoult

118. “You have to understand – there is a romance to Africa. You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the hand of God. You watch the slow lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heat, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world.”

— Jodi Picoult

119. “That’s why we read fiction, isn’t it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we’re not the only ones?”

— Jodi Picoult

120. “I imagine having that sixth sense, the certainty that what I’m looking for is within reach, even if it’s still hidden.”

— Jodi Picoult

121. “The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.”

— Jodi Picoult

122. “It’s not the years in your life that count, but the life in your years.”

— Jodi Picoult

123. “When you can’t see light at the end of the tunnel, it’s hard to remember to keep going.”

— Jodi Picoult

124. “If you’ve lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it, and if you didn’t – you will never understand.”

— Jodi Picoult

125. “I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn’t get past something like that, you got through it.”

— Jodi Picoult

126. “I adore the way he looks at me sometimes, as if love is a quantity he cannot measure scientifically, because it multiplies too quickly.”

— Jodi Picoult

127. “Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?”

— Jodi Picoult

128. “My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.”

— Jodi Picoult

129. “When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.”

— Jodi Picoult

130. “The best lies are the ones that are wrapped around a core of truth.”

— Jodi Picoult

131. “The doctors may be mapping out the war games, but it is the nurses who make the conflict bearable.”

— Jodi Picoult

132. “In reality, you don’t ever change the hurricane. You just learn how to stay out of its path.”

— Jodi Picoult

133. “I’m grateful for my children, who are slowly emerging to become their own wonderful, interesting, compassionate young adults – which makes me believe that along the way I must have done something right.”

— Jodi Picoult

134. “The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it... some stories just don’t have a happy ending.”

— Jodi Picoult

135. “Saying goodbye to the people you love isn’t easy.”

— Jodi Picoult

136. “Sometimes, when you don’t ask questions, it’s not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It’s because you’re afraid they’ll tell you the truth.”

— Jodi Picoult

137. “Suddenly, I don’t want to be this person anymore. I don’t want to pretend I’m fooling the world when I’m not. I want someone else to have a plan for me, because I’m not doing a very good job myself.”

— Jodi Picoult

138. “The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve. The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it... some stories just don’t have a happy ending.”

— Jodi Picoult

139. “There are millions of people in the world, and the spirits will see that most of them you never have to meet. But there are one or two you are tied to, and the spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right.”

— Jodi Picoult

140. “People work too hard to figure out the meaning of their lives. Why me, why now. The truth is, sometimes things don’t happen to you for a reason. Sometimes it’s just about being in the right place at the right time for someone else.”

— Jodi Picoult

141. “I told myself that if I didn’t care, this wouldn’t have hurt so much – surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn’t a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.”

— Jodi Picoult

142. “I wonder if what makes a family a family isn’t doing everything right all the time but, instead, giving a second chance to the people you love who do things wrong.”

— Jodi Picoult

143. “The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night – because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.”

— Jodi Picoult

144. “But there’s a part of me that wonders what it would be like to be the most important person to someone else, to always feel like you were missing a piece of yourself when he wasn’t near you.”

— Jodi Picoult

145. “Small Great Things is a reference to a quote often attributed to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.”

— Jodi Picoult

146. “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.”

— Jodi Picoult

147. “It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.”

— Jodi Picoult

148. “We all have things that come back to haunt us. Some of us just see them more clearly than others.”

— Jodi Picoult

149. “I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.”

— Jodi Picoult

150. “Q: How would you like your eggs in the morning? A: Unfertilized.”

— Jodi Picoult