Jodi Picoult Quotes

Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.

You slammed my face down on the barbecue grill, now my scars are all healing, but my heart never will.

You can be chased home or hit or called names or spit on, and it's over. You have the memory of it, but it's very different from the emotional and psychological experience of feeling invisible, of not learning the confidence to stand up in class and speak.

I grew up in an abusive home and was told on a daily basis by my father that I would never amount to anything and that I looked like a boy.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

My Struggles is a record close to me. It's about what I went through at home living with an abusive father.

I did some research into domestic violence, and there were some stories that will stay me with forever.

I know what it feels like to be a victim of domestic violence.

Like with all other crime, we must, of course, treat the perpetrators of these actions as the criminals they are. But unlike with the vast majority of other crime, justice is not delivered simply by punishing the perpetrator. This is because the harm associated with domestic violence extends far beyond the point of contact.

My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.

There must be a reason that these bad things happen to me. I must be dysfunctional. So why would my dad leave? Why would he kill himself? Why would I be violated? And when you're 6-years-old, you can't comprehend that. But as you get much older in life, you begin to think what's wrong with me?

I was in such a state of mental shock and quickly spiraled into a depression at the multitude of loss. My husband, I thought, was going to leave me. I was cut off from this mentor and someone I cared for very much, David Petraeus, who also did nothing to stand up for me and in fact, empowered his surrogates to throw me under the bus, and that was devastating.

To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating.

I've suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.

The most likely person to kill you is your wife, but that probably won't happen. What probably will happen is a million little betrayals of varying degrees of pain, brought on by people you love, the only ones who really can hurt you.

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.

Not even Carol knows firsthand how it feels to be hurt in such a way by someone who's supposed to protect you

He raped me … he fondled me, he put me on all fours, and had sex with me.

Domestic violence causes far more pain than the visible marks of bruises and scars. It is devastating to be abused by someone that you love and think loves you in return. It is estimated that approximately 3 million incidents of domestic violence are reported each year in the United States.

Afterward, I curl around her. We lie in silence until darkness falls, and then, haltingly, she begins to talk...She speaks without need or even room for response, so I simply hold her and stroke her hair. She talks of the pain, grief, and horror of the past four years; of learning to cope with being the wife of a man so violent and unpredictable his touch made her skin crawl and of thinking, until quite recently, that she'd finally managed to do that. And then, finally, of how my appearance had forced her to realize she hadn't learned to cope at all.

My wife is my best friend. The thought that people are afraid to go home to their partners for fear of being abused physically or emotionally makes me feel sick. It's not easy but you need to get help and get out.

The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

I understand pain. I've lived with pain my entire life. But pain is nothing compared to betrayal. And betrayal is nothing compared to knowing that the javelin in your back was rammed there by the one person in your life you actually trusted.

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil

You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.