Top 500 Jodi Picoult Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “But that’s what love is, isn’t it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?”

— Jodi Picoult

402. “I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I’d hurt Rob. Maybe that’s what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we’ve wounded the people we’re trying to protect.”

— Jodi Picoult

403. “I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don’t understand how I’m going to get from here to there.”

— Jodi Picoult

404. “When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance.”

— Jodi Picoult

405. “The right idea is the one you can’t stop thinking about; the one that’s in your head first thing in the morning.”

— Jodi Picoult

406. “Listen, I would say, this is not how I thought our lives would go; and may be we cannot find our way out of this alley. But there is no one I’d rather be lost with.”

— Jodi Picoult

407. “This was the reason there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that didn’t have words big enough to describe them.”

— Jodi Picoult

408. “What you notice is the loneliness. Daniel started to isolate himself, because it hurt less than being pushed away.”

— Jodi Picoult

409. “Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief.”

— Jodi Picoult

410. “My father says that a fire will burn itself out, unless you open a window and give it fuel.”

— Jodi Picoult

411. “Sometimes we don’t know we’re dreaming; we can’t even fathom that we’re asleep.”

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

413. “Just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean it’s any less true.”

— Jodi Picoult

414. “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.”

— Jodi Picoult

415. “How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.”

— Jodi Picoult

416. “If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.”

— Jodi Picoult

417. “Her mouth is always on the verge of a smile. It makes her look like there’s always something amazing she needs to tell me, even when it’s just hello.”

— Jodi Picoult

418. “I found plain truth very interesting.”

— Jodi Picoult

419. “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

420. “Sometimes I think there’s a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that’s where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can’t help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.”

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

422. “Hope is what makes you look outside the window to see if it’s stopped raining. Hope is what makes you believe he’ll text you back. Hope is why you buy your jeans a little tight... Hope is why you get out of bed in the morning, and why you dream at night. Hope is what makes us believe that things can only get better. Hope is what keeps us going.”

— Jodi Picoult

423. “And he made love to her, offering his body in both tenderness and anger, unsure which was the best way to pass her bits of his soul so that she could patch her own with it.”

— Jodi Picoult

424. “Why do some memories bleed out of nowhere and others stay locked behind doors?”

— Jodi Picoult

425. “Bleeding heart, he’d called her. Well. He should know. He’d been the first to rip it to pieces.”

— Jodi Picoult

426. “Good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.”

— Jodi Picoult

427. “I don’t know the first thing about holding together a family, especially one that resembles an heirloom vase, shattered but glued back together for its beauty, and no one mentions that you can see the cracks as plain as day.”

— Jodi Picoult

428. “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

429. “If you live in each other’s pockets long enough, you’re related.”

— Jodi Picoult

430. “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

431. “When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.”

— Jodi Picoult

432. “What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline crack.”

— Jodi Picoult

433. “You don’t make peace only with G-d. You make it with people. Sin isn’t global. It’s personal. If you do wrong to someone, the only way to fix that is to go to that same person and do right by him.”

— Jodi Picoult

434. “She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life.”

— Jodi Picoult

435. “There is a place in you that you don’t even know exists, where you can simply stand back and watch without feeling any pain.”

— Jodi Picoult

436. “And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.”

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

438. “But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn’t, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? Whats stronger- the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one’s back on it?”

— Jodi Picoult

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

444. “You signed no contract to become a parent, but the responsibilities were written in invisible ink. There was a point when you had to support your child, even if no one else would. It was your job to rebuild the bridge, even if your child was the one who burned it in the first place.”

— Jodi Picoult

445. “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

446. “It felt like I’d been living underground, and for a moment, I’d been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you’ve seen that, how can you go back where you came from?”

— Jodi Picoult

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

— Jodi Picoult

448. “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

449. “The person may have a scar, but it also means they have a story.”

— Jodi Picoult

450. “Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect – I guess that’s where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who’s there to remind you what you learned along the way.”

— Jodi Picoult