You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he’s really just hoping he makes it all the way across?
The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.
A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.
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?
Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it’s there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.
Jodi Picoult
What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.
When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires
Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.
The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they’d lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it
A very wise man once told me that you can’t look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.
Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn’t yours. But grief comes from losing something you’ve already had.
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.
Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you’d been before the fall.
The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we’re supposed to.
You don’t have to say I love you to say I love you,” you said with a shrug. “All you have to do is say my name and I know.”
…”Can’t you hear it?” you said. “When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it’s safe inside your mouth.
Jodi Picoult
How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?
What if love wasn’t the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?
People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.
You know someone’s right for you when the things they don’t have to say are even more important than the things they do.
Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy’s dying wish?
What you know isn’t nearly as important as who you know. Who will miss you. Who you will miss.
If you’re afraid of everyone leaving you, what do you do?”
Make them stay.”
And if you can’t do that, or don’t know how to?”
Ellie shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Yes, you do. In fact, you’ve done it. You leave first,” Coop said, “so you don’t have to watch them walk away.
How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?
I don’t think we get a choice in who we fall for,” Ian whispers. “I think we just do.
Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can’t] save a single person.
Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.
Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.
If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.
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?
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.
Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.
I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.
My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn’t a social construct but an instinct.
Jodi Picoult
The scariest thing in the world is thinking someone you love is going to die.
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?
You know it’s never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It’s always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.
You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can’t see the wound doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.
There are five things we need to say to people we love before they die…: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye.
There are so many things I can’t believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I’ll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead of who they are. That happy endings don’t have contingencies and conditions.