Jodi Picoult: The legal system works really well, if you communicate a...

I believe in love. I think it just hits you and pulls the rug out from underneath you and, like a baby, demands your attention every minute of the day.

Jodi Picoult

baby believe thinking

I know that there will be other women, but they couldn't compare. Maybe I'll change, maybe love will change, but I think we were a once-in-a-lifetime. You could never leave me; that's why I am not more upset. You can't possibly break these feelings. They stretch, and they last.

Jodi Picoult

upset feelings thinking

"Stupid English."

Jodi Picoult

stupid writing teacher

She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess.

Jodi Picoult

excess passion way

There are two reasons not to tell the truth--becuase lying will get you what you want, and because lying will keep someone from getting hurt.

Jodi Picoult

hurt two lying

Joseph Obomsawin, the elder I lived with there, says that those who turn to animals do so because humans have let them down.

Jodi Picoult

turns humans animal

You can stay up all night and still not count all the ways to lose the people you love.

Jodi Picoult

night people way

Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.

Jodi Picoult

best-things settling sometimes

You get through it, you just never get over it

Jodi Picoult

over-it get-over

Everyone deserves a happy ending.

Jodi Picoult

happy-endings deserve

I've never been in love, but I've always imagined it--weirdly--like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. "Love," the host will say, "makes life a little brighter.

Jodi Picoult

ordinary-days loneliness mistake

No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.

Jodi Picoult

growing-up mean kids

We'd sit with a big bowl of popcorn, wrapped together in a queen-size blanket, and would escape to a place where magic was ours for the taking, where men rescued the people they loved instead of abandoning them. A place where, no matter how bad things looked at that moment, there would always be a happy ending.

Jodi Picoult

queens men people

What could it be like to find out, in a matter of minutes, that the person you believed the sun rose and set on was not the person you'd thought?

Jodi Picoult

matter sun rose

You always knew after shitty things happened, who your friends really were.

Jodi Picoult

behind-your-back fake-friends happened

Just 'cause you can't see me don't mean I gone away.

Jodi Picoult

gone-away causes mean

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

Jodi Picoult

eye believe people

When you love someone, you don't see parts of him you don't like.

Jodi Picoult

love-someone when-you-love-someone

You know, Michael, I used to sit around looking for a way to make sense of what happened, like there was some kind of answer I could find if I just looked hard enough. Then one day I realized that if there had been one, Dave would still be here. And I wondered if this...this feeling that I couldn't figure it all out...was what Dave had been feeling, too.

Jodi Picoult

one-day answers feelings

I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live

Jodi Picoult

coward too-much

The legal system works really well, if you communicate a certain way. But if you don't, it all goes to Hell in a handbasket really quickly.