Quotes from Second Glance

Jodi Picoult ·  448 pages

Rating: (38K votes)


“Love is not a because, it's a no matter what.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Did you ever walk through a room that's packed with people, and feel so lonely you can hardly take the next step?”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“When we're awake, we see what we need to see. When we're asleep, we see what is really there.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance



“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, quote from Second Glance


“Some women are meant to change the world, while others are meant to hold it together. And then there are those of us who simply don't want to be in it, because we know no matter how much we struggle, we can't comfortably fit.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time. ”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Infatuation's just another word for not seeing clearly. When you start to love a person- that's when they become real”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“And oh she had been broken. She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance



“What makes you walk past thirty-thousand people without a second glance, and then you look at the thirty-thousandth-and-first person and know you'll never take your eyes off her again?”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“I wish I could tell him I understand: the higher you raise your hopes, the farther you have to fall.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Life was all about being in a certain place, at a certain time.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Words, for all they were flimsy and invisible, had great strength. They could be fortified as a castle wall and sharp as a foil. They could bite, slap, shock, wound. But unlike deeds, words couldn't really help you. No promise ever rescued a person; it was the carrying-through of it that brought about salvation.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance



“She understood what it was like to stand right in front of people you loved, even though they could not see you.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Ross believed in past lives. Moreover, he believed that the person you fell in love with in each life was the same person you fell in love with in the life before, and the one before that. Sometimes, you might miss her - she'd be reborn in post-World War I generation, and you wouldn't come back until the fifties. Sometimes, your paths would cross and you wouldn't recognize each other. Get it right - that is: fall madly, truly, deeply - and perhaps there'd be an eternity carved out solely for the two of you.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Then they scrambled through the window and into the darkness, determined to turn themselves into what they were not.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“After all, once you know that part of something exists, it stands to reason that the rest of it is somewhere out there, too.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance



“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, quote from Second Glance


“Shelby believed that love was like a solar eclipse - breathtakingly beautiful, absorbing, and capable of rendering you blind. She had not necessarily gone out of her way to avoid a relationship, but she hadn't wanted on either. It was called falling in love for a reason - because, inevitably, you crashed at the bottom.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Regret hung from the hem of everyone's lives, a rip cord reminder that what you want is not always what you get. Look at himself, outliving Aimee. Or Az, trying to find his daughter, only to have her wind up dead. Look at Shelby, with a child who was dying by degrees. Ethan, born into a body nobody deserves. At some point or another, everyone was failed by this world. Disappointment was the one thin humans had in common.
Taken this way, Ross didn't feel quite so alone. Trapped in your whirlpool of what might have been, you might no be able to drag yourself out - but you could be saved by someone else who reached in.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“She thought of death like the seam of a hem: each time you lose someone close, it unraveled a little. You could still go along with your life, but you'd be forever tripping over something you previously took for granted.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“Close a door, and you'd still feel a breeze through the window.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance



“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, quote from Second Glance


“As anyone who's ever contracted it knows, lies are an infectious disease. They slip under the almond slivers of your fingernails and into your bloodstream.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“How could you beat an enemy you couldn't see?”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“When someone loves you up one side and down the other like that, you make every effort to stick around.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance


“That's because you've never been one. You haven't spent years wearing someone else's clothes, taking someone else's name, living in someone else's houses, and working someone else's job to fit in. And if you don't sell out, then you run away... proving you're the Gypsy they said you were all along.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Second Glance



About the author

Jodi Picoult
Born place: in Nesconset, Long Island, New York,, The United States
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