Jodi Picoult

Suffering so someone else didn't have to suffer. Sacrificing your body for someone else's well being.

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

Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.

by now you've already formed your own impression. you believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person's past has nothing to do with his future. you think i am either a hero, or a monster. maybe knowning more about circumstances will make you think differently about me, but it won't change what happened twenty-eight years ago.

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

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.

My first strike was marrying a guy without a college degree. My second and third were getting pregnant. I suppose that when I didn't go on to become the next Gloria Allred, she was justified in counting me a failure. And I suppose that until now, I was justified in thinking that I wasn't one.

When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn't.

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

Here's a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we'd rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman who's soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to.

The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we're supposed to.

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

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

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.

She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand.I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead.