“It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“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, quote from Vanishing Acts
“Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“You can't exist in this world without leaving a piece of yourself behind.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“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, quote from Vanishing Acts
“Just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“If it had been easy for Romeo to get to Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength - and the honesty - to break them down.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“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, quote from Vanishing Acts
“The only way someone can leave you is if you let them.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“When you love someone more than he loves you, you'll do anything to switch the scales. You dress the way you think he'd like you to dress. You pick up his favorite figures of expression. You tell yourself that if you re-create yourself in his image, then he'll crave you in the same way you crave him.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“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, quote from Vanishing Acts
“I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“It's choice that makes us human.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right. The challenge is figuring out which is which.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“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, quote from Vanishing Acts
“Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“Who I am, and what I am capable of doing has always managed to surprise me.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“When I'm with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that's backing up.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness. But all this took me a lifetime to discover, and where has it gotten me?... Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watched from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We are hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“I know better than most people that a criminal isn't always a thug in a black leather jacket with a big brand on his forehead to warn us away. Criminals sit next to us on the bus. They pack our groceries and cash our paychecks for us and teach our children. They look no different from you or me. And that's why they get away with it.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again, yet after having given birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep it close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“Love is the most dangerous craving of all, if you ask me. It turns us into people we aren't. It makes us feel like hell, and makes us walk on water. It ruins us for anything else.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
“The desperate usually succeed because they have nothing to lose.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Vanishing Acts
Jodi Picoult
Born place: in Nesconset, Long Island, New York,, The United States
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“There are enough staid people in the world holding things as they are. We need no more of them. What we need is people caught by the truth that no one is free when anyone is bound. That is not an easy idea to have get a hold on you. It has to be applied person by person, not just in the pious generalities of the resolutions good people pass when they gather for a moment and separate without effective action. Marshall”
― Gilbert King, quote from Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
“I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point.
Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the
thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable;
the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.
It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then were they dissociated?”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
“We don't belong anywhere, because we can belong everywhere.”
― Kirsty Logan, quote from The Gracekeepers
“Tsunami was drilling RainWings in evasive maneuvers, although apparently what that actually meant was a lot of yelling things like “Pay attention!” and “Leave that toucan alone!” and “Why are you pink? Stop being pink!” and “THREE MOONS, ARE YOU EATING AGAIN?”
― Tui T. Sutherland, quote from The Brightest Night
“Every now and then, if I allow my mental focus to slip, I catch myself looking at her face and forgetting how to breathe. I guess these things take time to fade completely.”
― Melissa Keil, quote from Life in Outer Space
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Waiting for the Barb...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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