Top 500 Jodi Picoult Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Life isn’t nearly as stable as we want it to be.”

— Jodi Picoult

202. “The best way to prevent a heartache was to cushion the coming blow.”

— Jodi Picoult

203. “A sacrament – like marriage – means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you’re modeling God. And God never gives up.”

— Jodi Picoult

204. “There is a fine line between seeing something that’s lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found.”

— Jodi Picoult

205. “Some people don’t know what to do with an act of kindness.”

— Jodi Picoult

206. “Since it had gotten so quiet in the room that you could hear the sound of your own doubts...”

— Jodi Picoult

207. “She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime.”

— Jodi Picoult

208. “Be a mensch, my mother told me, no matter what situation you’re in. Be kind to others before you take care of yourself; make whoever you’re with feel like they matter.”

— Jodi Picoult

209. “When it’s all over, you’re remembered for what you did, not what you said you were going to do.”

— Jodi Picoult

210. “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

211. “I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn’t be the cost of failure for a good friend.”

— Jodi Picoult

212. “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.”

— Jodi Picoult

213. “I used to think I’d be just like them when I grew up, but I am not. And the thing is, somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be like them, anyway.”

— Jodi Picoult

214. “It’s never the differences between people that suprise us. It’s the things that, against all odds, we have in common.”

— Jodi Picoult

215. “May be you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value.”

— Jodi Picoult

216. “When you have been burned by fire once, you don’t leap into the flames again.”

— Jodi Picoult

217. “We may not see eye to eye, but we can respect each other’s opinions and find the truth in them. Perhaps in those honest conversations, instead of demonizing each other, we might see each other as imperfect humans, doing our best. – Jodi Picoult, March 2018.”

— Jodi Picoult

218. “He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat.”

— Jodi Picoult

219. “I tell you this as a cautionary tale: beware of getting what you want. It’s bound to disappoint you.”

— Jodi Picoult

220. “Did you ever think that maybe what you see isn’t really what’s true?”

— Jodi Picoult

221. “When I was little, the great mystery to me was not how babies were made, but why?”

— Jodi Picoult

222. “The same things that trip you up as a human will tie you in knots as a spirit, if you don’t let go and let God.”

— Jodi Picoult

223. “You live and let live, eventually that becomes enough.”

— Jodi Picoult

224. “Love is like a tidal wave. It sucks you under and you drown. But sometimes, love is the only thing that keeps you afloat.”

— Jodi Picoult

225. “There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.”

— Jodi Picoult

226. “You might have to lose control before you could find out what you’d been missing.”

— Jodi Picoult

227. “The opposite of love, you think, isn’t hate. It’s complacency.”

— Jodi Picoult

228. “My father, a closet astronomer, has tried to explain black holes to me, how they are so heavy they absorb everything, even light, right into their center. Moments like this are the same kind of vacuum; no matter what you cling to, you wind up being sucked in.”

— Jodi Picoult

229. “Maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it.”

— Jodi Picoult

230. “People move too fast and talk too much, and before you know it, they come back to a place they don’t want to be – except now they know there’s nowhere left to run.”

— Jodi Picoult

231. “She’s not classically beautiful, but somehow that only makes her more interesting.”

— Jodi Picoult

232. “What I think is that there is no perspective in grief, or in love. How can there be, when one person becomes the center of the universe – either because he has been lost or because he has been found?”

— Jodi Picoult

233. “He is dark and quiet and completely different from me, which is exactly why I should put distance between us. But it is also the reason I find him so fascinating.”

— Jodi Picoult

234. “I also know that when you’re in the thick of living your life, you don’t often get to push pause and reflect on it. It’s just really hard to sit in the moment, and not worry if pause is going to turn into stop.”

— Jodi Picoult

235. “I believe that there are five things we need to say to people we love before they die, and I give this advice to caregivers: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye. I tell them that they can interpret those prompts any way they like, and nothing will have been left unsaid.”

— Jodi Picoult

236. “I don’t have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It’s about really putting yourself in their shoes.”

— Jodi Picoult

237. “It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you.”

— Jodi Picoult

238. “The world is a place where the extraordinary can sit just beside the ordinary with the thinnest of boundaries; that even in environments inhospitable to man, all sort of entities might thrive.”

— Jodi Picoult

239. “Sometimes there aren’t words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.”

— Jodi Picoult

240. “My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn’t a social construct but an instinct.”

— Jodi Picoult

241. “It took me a lifetime to realizethings don’t get lost if they don’t have value- you don’t miss what you don’t care about.”

— Jodi Picoult

242. “In the wild, an elephant mother and daughter stay in close proximity their whole lives; I hope I am that lucky.”

— Jodi Picoult

243. “I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them. Brian Fitzgerald, talking about his children.”

— Jodi Picoult

244. “People don’t just disappear. There’s always a reason, or an enemy with a grudge. There’s always a loose thread that starts to unravel.”

— Jodi Picoult

245. “When you love someone – when you create a child with him – you don’t just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can’t be destroyed, just channeled into something else.”

— Jodi Picoult

246. “That’s the paradox of loss: How can something that’s gone weigh us down so much?”

— Jodi Picoult

247. “Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There is only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.”

— Jodi Picoult

248. “Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.”

— Jodi Picoult

249. “Things break all the time. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Promises break. Hearts break.”

— Jodi Picoult

250. “Mistakes are like the memories you hide in an attic: old love letters from relationships that tanked, photos of dead relatives, toys from a childhood you miss. Out of sight is out of mind, but somewhere deep inside you know they still exist. And you also know that you’re avoiding them.”

— Jodi Picoult