Jodi Picoult

“I think we have stories because they help us understand who we are. But there's a tendency to assume that a story must be ingested in a certain way, that it must mean one thing. So readers are always trying to ferret out the truth. I want to argue that this idea is a raging and utter lie. The reader brings as much to the book as the writer does: You're bringing your past, you're bringing your thoughts, you're bringing your future. It's my job as a writer to tell you a story that's going to take you away from whatever you're doing—your laundry, your kids, whatever—but that, to me, is the least important part. When I sit down to write a book, my goal is to make you ask yourself, "Why are my opinions what they are?" I'm not going to make you change them necessarily. You might if I've done a good job, but at the very least, you're going to ask yourself where you stand on a given issue. To me, the mark of a great book is that it can move a variety of people, even though each person is connecting in a different way. The purpose of a story is to be a crowbar that slides under your skin and, with luck, cracks your mind wide open.”

“You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”

“Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.”

“If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?”

“Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.”

“You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake.”

“It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you.”

“love doesn't follow the rules... nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable.”

“My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it’s faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.”

“It is so easy to think that the world revolves around you, but all you have to do is stare up at the sky to realize it isn't that way at all.”

“Maybe if God gives you a handicap, he makes sure you've got a few extra doses of humor to take the edge off.”

“Time is an optical illusion- never quite as soild or strong as we think it is”

“well, sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.”

“she told me she'd be a phoenix." The image of the mythical creature rising from the ashes glitters in my mind. "They don't really exist." "She said that depends on whether or not there's someone who can see them.”

My Sister’s Keeper

Nineteen Minutes

“Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?”

“In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn; color your hair; watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five.In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world; or you can just jump off it.”

“But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like”

“When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound.You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart.You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like. ”

“Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows upand becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won’t catch anyone’s attention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“Or. I hate that word. It’s two letters long and stuffed to the gills with reasonable doubt.”

“Everyone would remember Peter for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy would be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive. For every recollection of him that involved a bullet or a scream, she would have a hundred others: of a little boy splashing in a pond, or riding a bicycle for the first time, or waving from the top of a jungle gym. Of a kiss good night, or a crayoned Mother's Day card, or a voice off-key in the shower. She would string them together - the moments when her child had been just like other people's. She would wear them, precious pearls, every day of her life; because if she lost them, then the boy she had loved and raised and known would really be gone.

“When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.”

“She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.”

“I’d much rather pretend I’m somewhere else, and any time I open the pages of a book, that happens.” “Everyone deserves a happy ending.”

“He’s not your typical prince, more like a square peg in a round hole, kind of like me. He’s the sort of guy who wouldn’t mind reading side by side on a date.”

“Just so you know, when they say "once upon a time"....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.”

“The question is not if you're willing to die for her. The question is, can you live without her?”

“How do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she's stopped believing the impossible can happen?”

“Being a teenager isn't all that different from being part of someone else's story. There's always someone who thinks they know better than you do”

“What makes a treasure a treasure." Marine replied, "is how rare a find it is, when you need it the most.”

Between The Lines

“THE GREAT GATSBY, because it was my first experience with an unreliable narrator and since then I’ve loved playing with the dichotomy between what the reader knows and what the narrator knows; THE SUN ALSO RISES, because of Hemingway’s parity of language and the way he constantly reminds us there are some topics and emotions that cannot be explained in mere words”

“The nice thing about a novel is that it allows you to raise a topic many people don’t want to explore (really, do you want to pick up a nonfiction book about end-of-life care??) However, by living vicariously through the experiences of the characters, the reader can find him/herself learning something personally relevant.”

I write…“books that make you think hard about questions that don't have easy answers.”

“I don’t always expect them to change their minds about a controversial issue, but I hope they’ve listened to the other side’s point of view, and asked themselves why they believe what they do.”

Awards-New England Bookseller Award for Fiction

-Alex Award from YA Library Services Association

-Book Browse Diamond Award

-Lifetime Achievement Award

-Cosmo’s ‘Fearless Fiction’ Award

-Waterston’s Author of the Year in UK

-Vermont Green Mountain Book Award

-Virginia’s Reader’s Choice Award

-Abraham Lincoln Illinois High School Book Award

-Maryland BES