01c. 1966 ADHe gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
02c. 1966 ADMaybe you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
03c. 1966 ADIf you think about someone you've loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
04c. 1966 ADThere are all sorts of losses people suffer- from the small to the large. You can lose your car keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
05c. 1966 ADHow do you do it?""Do what?""All of it. You know. Go to class and practice. Make it through the day. Act like ... like none if it mattered."Jason swore beneath his breath and pulled the car over. Then he reached across the seat and brushed his thumb over her cheek; until then, she hadn't been aware she was crying. "Trix," he sighed, "it mattered.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
06c. 1966 ADIt was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
07c. 1966 ADHow could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
08c. 1966 ADWhen a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
09c. 1966 ADBut that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
10c. 1966 ADThere are all sorts of losses people suffer - from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
11c. 1966 ADHow can you ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottomJodi Picoult / quote ↗
12c. 1966 ADYou have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
13c. 1966 ADGrief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aidbeing ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbellyof a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times Istayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that Iwould not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that myfather worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to comehome to a house that felt too big for us.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
14c. 1966 ADShe has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James. He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself? James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
15c. 1966 ADWhat I think is that there is no perspective in grief, or in love. How can there be, when one person becomes the center of the universe - either because he has been lost or because he has been found?Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
16c. 1966 ADThat the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes.I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
17c. 1966 ADI told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
18c. 1966 ADYou know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
19c. 1966 ADI [Jacob Hunt, Aspie] see it as the next step of evolution: I cannot take away your sadness, so why should I acknowledge it?Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
20c. 1966 ADYou always knew after shitty things happened, who your friends really were.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
21c. 1966 ADMen. You can't live with them...and you can't legally shoot them. I tossed out my husband eight years ago and got a llama instead. Best decision I ever made.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
23c. 1966 ADMy brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
24c. 1966 ADMy grandmother lived a remarkable life. She watched her nation fall to pieces; and even when she became collateral damage, she believed in the power of the human spirit. She gave when she had nothing; she fought when she could barely stand; she clung to tomorrow when she couldn’t find footing on the rock ledge of yesterday. She was a chameleon, slipping into the personae of a privileged young girl, a frightened teen, a dreamy novelist, a proud prisoner, an army wife, a mother hen. She became whomever she needed to be to survive, but she never let anyone else define her. By anyone’s account, her existence had been full, rich, important—even if she chose not to shout about her past, but rather to keep it hidden. It had been nobody’s business but her own; it was still nobody’s business.Jodi Picoult / quote ↗
