Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
59 quotes
"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 broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else."
"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 Charlotte - a woman who's soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to."
"Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board."
"But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture."
"Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child."
"It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye."
"No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged."
"When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong."
"She'd been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. 'You are so beautiful,' her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders.'You are so full of shit,' Lila snarled, but as a contraction settled over her like a net, she bore down and pushed."
"Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damagers awards."
"Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer."
"Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything."
"I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend."
"Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect."
"I wondered about the explorers who'd sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams."
"There are kinds of pain that you can't speak out loud."
"I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting."
"When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you don't just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can't be destroyed, just channeled into something else."
"It was a strange thing, to still be in love with your wife and to not know if you liked her. What would happen when this was all over? Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help?I had filed for divorce, but that wasn't what I really wanted. What I really wanted was for all of us to go back two years, and start over. Had I ever really told her that?"
"So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent I'd forgotten to communicate?"
"I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet."
"Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids... but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life."
"[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period."
"I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself."
"You don't have to say I love you to say I love you."