Jodi Picoult

“What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?”

“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 cou...”

“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 br...”

“How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?”

“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 unattainab...”

“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.”

“If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.”

“The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we're supposed to.”

“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...”

“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.”

“Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you.”

“Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remin...”

“She puts her hands on either side of my face, and the room falls away. I have never gotten so lost in a kiss before. And then, the space between us explodes. My heart keeps missing beats and...”

“If I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during th...”

“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.”

“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 differ...”