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

“Did the priest you mentioned tell you about them? Or did he send you out to blunder along on your own?They're an odd lot. Half of them are soldiers, or priests in disgui- Ah.Is your priest with them?"
"No!" He snapped.
Ping. He jumped. He'd forgotten the bell.
"I mean, I don't know". Ping. "There is no particular priest."Ping. He bit his lip and fell silent.”
― Hilari Bell, quote from The Goblin Wood

“In point of fact, he was not afraid to die, not anymore. He now understood with a faith that he had never before possessed that he would see those he had lost when he died, that everything would be made whole, that he would talk to Boukman, and his mother and father and sister, again. It was true that there was no need on earth that could not be slaked and satisfied. When you are thirsty there is water. When you are hungry there is food. It is impossible to need a thing without that thing being available for the having. A man may want a green horse that flies, but he canot need one, for there is no such thing.
At this precise moment, Toussaint felt that he needed Boukman, that he could not bear it if he never saw him again, and he knew, because this need existed, that it would be met.”
― Nick Lake, quote from In Darkness

“Dunque," mormorò, "secondo lei le feste natalizie sono un'epoca poco favorevole ai delitti."
"E' quel che penso."
"Perché?"
"Perché?" Johnson parve un pò perplesso. "Perché, come ho detto, c'è un senso diffuso di allegria, di buona volontà...di buoni pranzi..."
"Come siete sentimentali, voi inglesi!"
"Bé, e anche se fosse così, che male ci vede? E' forse un male amare le tradizioni, le vecchie feste?"
"Oh no, nessun male, anzi è una cosa molto poetica! Ma esaminiamo i fatti. Lei ha detto che Natale è un'epoca di buoni pranzi. Questo significa che in questi giorni si mangia e si beve troppo...Per conseguenza...indigestioni, e all'indigestione si accompagna spesso una speciale irritabilità del carattere."
"Ma i delitti non vengono commessi per irritabilità."
"uhm! Non ne sono troppo sicuro...Ma partiamo anche da un altro punto di vista. A Natale impera lo spirito di "buona volontà". Vecchi litigi vengono dimenticati, coloro che si trovano in disaccordo fanno la pace...Sia pure provvisoriamente, le famiglie che sono state separate per tutto l'anno si raccolgono ancora una volta. In queste occasioni, amico mio, deve ammettere che i nervi possono venir sottoposti a dura prova. Persone che non hanno alcuna voglia di essere amabili fanno uno sforzo per apparirlo...C'è in essi molta ipocrisia, a Natale, onorevole ipocrisia, senza dubbio, ipocrisia pour le bon motif, ma sempre ipocrisia."
"Bé...io non presenterei le cose in questo modo," disse Johnson con aria dubbiosa.
Poirot gli sorrise.
"No, no, sono io che le presento così...e che sostengo come lo sforzo per essere buoni e amabili crei un malessere che può riuscire in definitiva pericoloso. Chiudete le valvole di sicurezza del vostro contegno naturale, e, presto o tardi, la caldaia scoppierà provocando un disastro."
Il colonnello Johnson guardò il piccolo belga.
"Non riesco mai a capire quando parla sul serio e quando si sta burlando di me."
"Non parlo sul serio, no!" disse Poirot ridendo. "Nemmeno per sogno. Ma sostengo che condizioni artificiali di vita finiscono sempre con una naturale reazione.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Hercule Poirot's Christmas

“Yet a sailor's life is at best, but a mixture of a little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the solemn with the ludicrous.”
― Richard Henry Dana Jr., quote from Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea

“the use of profanity for effect to be a practice of the weak-minded”
― Terry Fallis, quote from The Best Laid Plans

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