Jodi Picoult Quotes

They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.

Isn't it funny how the people least impacted by tragedy are the most eager to move on?

I grew up bar-singing and saw all kinds of ways people tried to outrun their emotional pain. It doesn't work. You end up with the original pain, as well as new pain added on top of it from the tactics you used trying to avoid it in the first place. It's best to take a deep breath, bolster yourself, and walk through it.

Without anyone's help, Darth Maul will only commit himself to his mistakes of the past. Every time we find this character, he is living in the past and in some cases he is living with the dead. This character is desperate and he needs Obi-Wan's help to move on.

Growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.

We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.

The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.

If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

You have to make the decision to let go of the past if you want to move forward. Reliving your painful past will poison your heart and your tomorrow. If you look at today through the eyes of the past, you can never see what the present moment has to offer.

I look back and think of all the times I've had to let things go in the past, and how traumatic it seemed while it was happening, but how my understanding of it changed as time passed - and oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term. So I remind myself of that.

The portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that felt really big and important.

There is a big difference between hurt and harm. We all hurt sometimes in facing hard truths, but it makes us grow. It can be the source of huge growth. That is not harmful. Harm is when you damage someone. Facing reality is usually not a damaging experience, even though it can hurt.

If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.

I know I can do it," Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. "I'm sure that in time her death will be a mystery, even to me.

I get so sick and tired of hearing people gripe about what their parents did to them. You know what your parents did to you? The best thing they could do. The best thing they knew how, the only thing in many cases that they knew how. Nobody has set out maliciously to hurt their child, unless they were psychotic.

Loss either teaches you to persist in the face of suffering, or hardens you into a bitter cynic. Sometimes, it does a little of both.

Oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term.

I'm not going to waste my energy looking into the eyes of someone like the guy who blew my legs off trying to find a way to forgive him for doing something that horrible when there are way more productive ways I could be spending my life. You've got to focus on moving on.

You have to be able to say, OK, that happened back then. Now let's take it from here and see what happens. It would be very easy to hate people for the rest of your life, and some people have done that. You've got to deal with what's happening now and try to make things better.

I really believe that our past can really hold us back from growth, so the best thing that we can do is MOVE ON and NOT DWELL.

As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?

If you were in a bad relationship and you meet someone new, you're going to leave with your luggage. The next person is going to have to endure things that someone else causes.