2. No matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it... some stories just don't have a happy ending.
3. When someone leaves you, once you expect it to happen again. Eventually you stop getting close enough to people to let them become important to you, because then you don't notice when they drop out of your world.
4. That's the hard part, knowing what you know and not being able to do a damn thing about it.
5. If you want answers, you better be ready to hear them.
6. You can't blame someone if they honestly don't understand that their reality isn't the same as yours.
7. People who dissapear have their reasons: they might have commited insurance fraud or be hiding from the cops. They might be up to their eyeballs in debt. They may have a secret they want no one to find out. They might have decided to start over.
8. I thought, stupidly, that if I start over, I could start fresh-free from guilt and questions.
9. Suddenly, doing the right thing isn't so black and white, is it?
10. If your life sucks completely, sometimes it's easier to start over.
11. There are two ways to live: (1) where you hang on to what you have in a death grip so you don't lose it, or (2) where you walk away from everything and everyone that matters before they can leave you behind. Either way, you're bound to be dissapointed.
12. Be careful what you wish for, sweetheart!
13. The sooner you know the truth, whatever it is, the sooner you can get on with your future.
14. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you've got, instead of what you don't.
15. Just because you don't remember, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
16. I thought the sooner we moved on, the sooner we could both start over.
17. Negative moments get remembered. Traumatic ones get forgotten.
18. Don't start something you can't finish.
19. If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together.
20. Flattery will get you nowhere.
21. Just because we can't see a fourth dimension doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means we haven't reached it yet.
22. Maybe if you opened yourself to the possibility, you'd find something unexpected.
23. You're going to have to let her/him go.
24. I think grieve is like a really ugly cough. It never goes away, you can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room-- but eventually, you learn to live with it.
25. Remember how many good memories we had here? And we sat, for just a little while, before moving elsewhere.
26. Is that why you push people away? So they can't get close enough to hurt you when they're gone?
27. Hysterical strength-- the life and death moments when people do extraordinary things, like a lifting a car off a loved one. The common denominator was a high stress situation that triggered adrenaline, which in turn led to someone trancending the limits of what his or her muscles should be capable of doing.
28. Some of the most psychopatic guys are domestic abusers. They're charming as all get out when they're in public; in private, they're animals.
29. I used to filter the information I got. If I thought it was going to be painful to my client, or upsetting, I'd levae the message out of my reading. Just pretend I never heard it, but eventually I realized it wasn't my business to judge the information I was getting. It was just my job to relay it.
30. I'm trying to tell you to stop being invested in where this is leading, and stop trying to steer it. Just follow where it goes.
31. You'd be surprised how much you can learn from someone who's completely dissapointed you.
32. Can a person hold tightly of two thought that look, at first sight, as if they'd cancel each other out?
33. You may not be very happy, but you are happy to be.
34. All the universe wants from us is two things: (1) don't do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and (2) get happy.
35. Children are the anchors of a mother's life (Sophocles, Phaedra).
36. If you are a mother, you must have someone to take care of.
37. I didn't want to make any assumptions, you know, that what had happened before would happen again.
38. Behaviour modification was done only with reward and positive reinforcement.
39. Lots of people were good at their jobs without actually enjoying what they were doing.
40. I wanted in him all the traits any female would want in the male she chose as the father for her offspring.
41. It's amazing, what they're willing to excuse. And I thought-- not for the last time--that forgiving and forgetting aren't mutually exclusive.
42. I wasn't running toward my future anymore. I was running away from everything else.
43. A forever home. I wanted that.
44. People who run away either have something they're trying to reach or something they're trying to avoid.
45. It's about me, finding my way.
46. Think about it: we both know what question to ask. We both know what questions not to ask. We are fluent in body language. We live and breathe intuition.
47. I don't get a vision, I focus on what's right in front of me. I am observer. I see a person who can't look me in the eye and I try to figure out whether it's grief or shame. I pay attention to what makes someone cry. I listen, even when no one's speaking words.
48. One of the most amazing things about elephants mourning in the wild is their ability to grieve hard, but then truly, unequivocally let go. Humans can't seem do that. I've always thought because of religion. We expect to see our loved ones again in the next life, whatever that might be. Elephant don't have that hope, only the memories of this life. Maybe that's why it is easier for them to move on.
49. Suicides, almost by definition, are all ghosts-- stuck earthbound because they are desperate to apologize to their loved ones or because they are so ashamed of themselves.
50. You can tell a lot about a person from their house.
51. Physically present, but mentally somewhere else.
52. Because I was unwilling to be the trigger that might set him off, I was willing to do whatever he wanted or needed. I was going to be his biggest cheerleader.
53. You don't know anything about me.
54. To the end, I decided the best way to snap him out of his folly was to help him remember what he still had.
55. It'll be worth the wait.
56. I thought marriage was a partnership, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.
57. Keeping a secret isn't always lying. Sometimes it's the only way to protect the person you love.
58. It's not that he doesn't love you enough to tell you the truth. It's that he loves you too much to risk it.
59. Go o ra motho, ga go lelwe (Tswana language). Where there is support, there is no grief.
60. Actual can be con. What you see is not what you believe.
61. Memory is not a video recording. It's subjective. It's a culturally relevant account to what happened. It doesn't matter if it's accurate; it matters if it's important in some way to you, if it teaches you something you need to learn.
62. We didn't come all this way for nothing. Let's go.
63. I had not asked to be rescued, true, but that did not mean I didn't need saving.
64. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said what I said to you.
65. Do you ever wonder if you fall for a person... or just the idea of him? 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?
66. Sometimes I think there's no such thing as falling in love. It's just the fear of losing someone.
67. I wanted the bond between them to be so strong that I could not, even accidentally, find a chink in the wall of their marriage through which I could pick.
68. I was being a bitch. But if that created a wall between us, that was safer.
69. The untouched collector's item might have been worth something but all those stolen moments were priceless.
70. It's no small feat, finishing a journey. But no one ever mentions that once you get there, you still have to turn around and head all the way home.
71. So now you know who I really am; I couldn't stand the thought of pretending to be the good guy for the next twenty years, when I knew I wasn't one. At least now when I tell people who I am, I'm not lying to them.
72. We've all got missing pieces. But for a little while, I believed that, together, we might be whole.
73. I did not know, really, what to expect. We'd had a year of secrets, a year of bliss.
74. I kept myself moving, so that I could not think about anything except the task in front of me.
75. Since I'd already lost him once, I don't feel like I'm losing him again.
76. There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else. Eventually someone brave and stupid will come along and try to fill that hole. But it never works, and so instead, that selfless soul winds up with a gap in his heart, too. And so on. It's a miracle that anyone survives, when so much of us is missing.
77. You could understand it perfectly, better than anyone else, because you know what it's like to have someone disappear.
78. You need to start living your own life, instead of hers.
79. When my clients used to come to me, asking to talk to their beloved one, all they were focusing on was the hello, the chance to say what they didn't say when the person was alive. But when you open a door, you have to close it behind you. You might say hello, but you also wind up saying goodbye.
80. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
81. One man's coincidence is another's connection.
82. The man who had a dream and had invited me to take part in it. I had not seen that man for a very long time. But was it because he'd disappeared? Or because I'd stopped looking?
83. Without you, everything would fall apart. That's why I knew you were the right guy to turn to for help.
84. I don't want to be left hanging, wondering what will happen for eternity.
85. It is why I don't like to close my eyes, because when you do, people disappear. And if people disappear, you don't know for sure that they are never coming back.
86. Be patient, you have to find what's lost.
87. I miss you and I mean it. I've had colleagues who pretend they like me but are really just jealous, but I never really had many true friends. Certainly not one who was such a skeptic yet still accepted me unconditionally.
88. Just because you leave someone doesn't mean you ever let them go. Even when you couldn't see me, you knew deep down I was still there.
89. If you think about someone you've loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details.
90. I'd been trained my whole life to focus on my brains and not my looks.
90. I'd been trained my whole life to focus on my brains and not my looks.
JODI PICOULT
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