Quotes from Vanishing Acts

“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

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Popular quotes

“The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.”
― Ann Patchett, quote from Bel Canto

“If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Make friends with fear, Lucien always said, because it will not go away, and it will destroy you if left uncontrolled.”
― John Grisham, quote from A Time to Kill

“What I'm certain I don't want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Cold Mountain

“soon will happen. But two advantages will”
― Jane Austen, quote from The Complete Novels

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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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.