Jodi Picoult Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead. My Sister's Keeper

2. A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations. Nineteen Minutes

3. 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. Handle with Care

4. and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.

5. Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far. Sing You Home

6. be a good listener, don't judge and don't put boundaries on someone else's grief. The Storyteller

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

8. But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone's expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. 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. Handle with Care

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

10. But there’s a part of me that wonders what it would be like to be the most important person to someone else, to always feel like you were missing a piece of yourself when he wasn’t near you. Between the Lines

11. Cara: I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn't mean you're fearless. It just means you fear different things. Lone Wolf

12. Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope. Nineteen Minutes

13. For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love. Sing You Home

14. He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable My Sister's Keeper

15. 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. Handle with Care

16. How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home? The Pact

17. How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury? Mercy

18. How do you know she’s the one for you?...and did you ever notice how, when she’s nervous,she sings? Off-key?You like that?Well, that's the thing. I think her flaws make me love her even more. She’s not perfect, but she’s perfect to me. Between the Lines

19. I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him. Keeping Faith

20. I don't think we get a choice in who we fall for," Ian whispers. "I think we just do. Keeping Faith

21. I don't think we get a choice in who we fall for," Ian whispers. "I think we just do. Keeping Faith

22. I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces. The Pact

23. I realize that I quite like this girl. It’s not just that she’s so pretty the words fly out of my mind before they can leave my mouth—it’s that when we’re chatting, I feel like I’ve known her all my life. Between the Lines

24. I think you can love a person too much.You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else. Handle with Care

25. I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it. Handle with Care

26. I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same. My Sister's Keeper

27. I, um, I have this problem. I broke up with my boyfriend, you see. And I'm pretty upset about it, so I wanted to talk to my best friend. [...] The thing is, they're both you. The Pact

28. I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not. My Sister's Keeper

29. If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can't someone be healed by happiness? Keeping Faith

30. If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled. Plain Truth