Jodi Picoult Quotes

I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive.

I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.

What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead.

Why was I feeling this way? Why was everything so bad in my life? I had no answers to these questions.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation..

My character in 'La Haine,' he's not bad; he's unhappy, and usually, people are like that. Most of us are angry.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

There is always something missing that torments me.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

Unhappiness was my god.

Unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money.

I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to men has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.

Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.

Tonight sucks. And look at me. Look at - look at stupid Buffy. Too dumb for college, and-and-and freak Buffy, too strong for construction work. And-and my job at the magic shop? I was bored to tears even before the hour that wouldn't end. And the only person that I can even stand to be around is a... neutered vampire who cheats at kitten poker.

I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.

We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.

Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.

For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change.

Nine men in ten are would be suicides.

The discontented man finds no easy chair.