Jodi Picoult Quotes

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

I've never really fit in.

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

I write about outsiders. I write about people who are outside and don't know quite how to get in because it's how I've always felt.

Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me.

I don't ever feel like anybody knows who I am.

I feel uncomfortable because I'm insecure about who I am.

I thought it was something peculiar to me. I thought I was abnormal.

I felt like, 'How do I fit in?' But then I never fit in. The whole time, I've never fit in.

I've always had this feeling wherever I go. Of not feeling fully part of things, not fully accepted, not fully inside of something.

I never quite fit in - at least, from my own perspective, you know.

I was always an outcast, even in my family.

When someone is looking at me, I feel they are looking at someone standing behind me, not at me.

In my early years, I couldn't find a community. I couldn't find anybody like me. I felt so isolated. There was nothing but shame and loneliness.

Being attracted to my own sex was as much part of who I was as being short or blonde or drawn to the library, but I was made to grow up feeling 'other.' Most books, films - even advertisements - didn't reflect how I felt, and I often watched the world from the outside.

As a little boy, I never felt comfortable with being human.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

How can I ask anyone to love me when all I do is beg to be left alone?

I don't feel very good about myself. People always leave me. Nobody can stand me for very long. I wish I could cut my tongue out, or take out the part of my brain that has opinions. Or cares. I wish I could be simple. Be quiet, introverted, or shy. I'm half way in between a wallflower at a party and Elvis Presley. People love one or the other. In between is no place to be.

I felt like an alien. I always felt like I never belonged to any group that I wanted to belong to.

As early as second grade I remember feeling really different and isolated. I had the hugest crush on a boy, and my best friend had a crush on him, too. One day he said to me, 'I like your best friend more because she's paler and she has freckles.' And it was right then that I began to feel like, Oh wow, I'm different.

I've always felt like an outsider across the board, since day one. The challenge has been to simply not pay attention to my outsider or insider status and just do the work and play the shows and connect with the people. And not even bother to play this game of keeping score, which is what destroys you.

It's as if I've inherited a skin I cannot quite fit, and so I walk about constantly pulling and and tugging, pinning and pruning, trying desperately to fill it out, hoping that no one will look at me struggling and say, 'That one there- she's a fraud, Look how she doesn't fit at all.

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn't allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn't do anything with my classmates.