Jodi Picoult Quotes

The only person I have hurt is myself.

No mat­ter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.

No one can hurt me - that's my job.

Nobody's trying to kill you, Deirdre. You're killing yourself.

She wanted, with her fickleness, to make my destruction constant; I want, by trying to destroy myself, to satisfy her desire.

And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.

I can hurt myself more than anyone else can, she told her sister. I can do it with my eyes closed.

I played with fire, did counsel spurn, Made life my common stake; But never thought that fire would burn, O that a soul could ache.

Everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I'd scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.

Until we get to the point where we've had enough of things that hurt and long more than anything for a peaceful love, we are bound to take painful roads. We are destined to play out our frivolous disasters until we declare ourselves finished and done with them. How much pain do we have to suffer before we are sure we want no more? As much, it seems, as we have to until we don't.

She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.

Self-inflicted misery smirks under its crown of thorns.

"It almost always happens that people enjoy a few moments and then afterwards feel very guilty. The guilt arises because of the ego. The ego starts torturing them, "What are you doing? Have you decided to kill me? And I am your only treasure. Killing me? You will be destroyed. Killing me is destroying yourself."

Even the mistakes and the pain that you've caused and enacted upon you. That is definitely what I'm trying to capture

I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing.

I made my own house be my gallows.

To caress the serpent that devours us, until it has eaten away our heart.

No one will love you more than you love your pain.

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

I look for women I know are gonna bust me up good. Come on, man, who can resist that? Who can resist that emotional pain? Yeah, they all have the same line, they're so sweet: I'm not gonna hurt you like all the others. Really I'm not. I'm gonna introduce you to a whole new level of pain!

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.

I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.

I suppose I’m the one responsible for destroying myself.

Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creators under any circumstances.

Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.