Jodi Picoult

"When you love someone you let them take care of you."

"I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father,"she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?"

"Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall."

"The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do."

"The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been."

"You don't have to say I love you to say I love you,"you said with a shrug. "All you have to do is say my name and I know."..."Can't you hear it?"you said. "When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth."

"and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart."

"The thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart of a soul mate."

"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."

"The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been."

"Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey."

"I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names."

"and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart."

"My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her."