Jodi Picoult, The Pact
19 quotes
"I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces."
"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 could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?"
"They go on to this better place, you know, which is what they wanted all along. But you and me, we're still left behind with all the questions they couldn't answer."
"He kissed her so gently she wondered if she had imagined it"
"Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting."
"She sobbed the way she did everything else- with passion and excess."
"If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related."
"I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don't understand how I'm going to get from here to there."
"How 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."
"You always knew after shitty things happened, who your friends really were."
"I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live"
"The way I see it, he's all we have left ofher."
"She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life."
"I can't do this to you,' he said, drawing back. Emily put her hand on his and pulled the gun to her temple. 'Then do it for me,' she said."
"Do you know what it's like to give your whole self to a person, and your whole heart to boot, until you've got nothing left to give- and then realize that it still isn't whay they need?"
"At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you became as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked "this too shall pass" - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something that everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgettingone how painful it had been at the time."
"Being a mother gives you a singular sort of vision, a prism through which you can see your child with many different faces all at once. It is the reason you can watch him shatter a ceramic lamp, and still remember him as an angel."
"...one half leaning in, one half pulling away."
"My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn’t all about me?"