Jodi Picoult, Handle With Care Quotes

When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.

I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.

Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.

Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.

People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.

All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.

I drew it over my skin like a violins bow, No one would ever hear the song of my shame.

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.

No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.

Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

You know how sometimes, your life is so perfect you’re afraid for the next moment, because it couldn’t possibly be quite as good? That’s what it felt like.

There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?

Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

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

I could not remember my first kiss, but I could have told you Charlotte would be my last.

Maybe a mother wasn't what she seemed to be on the surface.

I would prove to you that being different isn't a death sentence but a call to arms.

I think there are two different oceans - the one that plays with you in the summer, and the one that gets so mad in the winter.

You can miss a person you've never known.

Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

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.

The cost of growth is always a small act of violence.

[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period.

I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet.

So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent I'd forgotten to communicate?

When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you don't just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can't be destroyed, just channeled into something else.

When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.

A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up.

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend.

Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damagers awards.

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?

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

When we sat down on the couch again, you curled up against my side, like you used to when you were a tod

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.

Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up.

There are kinds of pain that you can't speak out loud.

You don't have to say I love you to say I love you.