Book detail: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
'Change of Heart' delves into the ethical challenges of organ donation. 'Handle with Care' examines the impact of a child's illness on a family. 'House Rules' focuses on the legal and emotional issues surrounding a child's disability.
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“There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“This is what it always comes down to, I realized. There are the ones who believe, and the ones who don't, and caught in the space between them are guns.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“I smiled at him as best I could and pushed the paper across the table before he could change his mind. Because Henry DeVille was correct - there was an ingredient in my baking more concenctrated than any extract, more pungent than any spice; an ingredient that everyone would recognize and no one was able to name: it was regret, and it rose when one least expected.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes. I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“We all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn’t have any.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“She stares at me for a moment, and then she bursts out laughing. “You haven’t seen his perfect little wife and his perfect little girls. Believe me, Oliver, I’m not the great love of his life, the one he’ll never forget.” “You are to me,” I say.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There is only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Just because you didn't put a name to something did not mean it wasn't there.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you don't just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can't be destroyed, just channeled into something else.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“It was a strange thing, to still be in love with your wife and to not know if you liked her. What would happen when this was all over? Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help? I had filed for divorce, but that wasn't what I really wanted. What I really wanted was for all of us to go back two years, and start over. Had I ever really told her that?”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“People changed. Even the people you thought you knew as well as you knew yourself.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Everytime I look at a zebra, I can't figure out whether it's black with white stripes or white with black stripes, and that frustrates me.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“My high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Inverholl, once had me take an aptitude test to figure out my future. The number one job recommendation for my set of skills was an air traffic accident investigator, of which there are fewer than fifty in the world. The number two job was a museum curator for Chinese-American studies. The number three job was a circus clown.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“I think you're the only person who gets me. When I'm with you, the world doesn't feel like a problem I can't figure out. Please come to the dance, because you're my music.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Dead isn’t angels or ghosts. It’s a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“People don’t just disappear. There’s always a reason, or an enemy with a grudge. There’s always a loose thread that starts to unravel.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“I am not a religious man. I have not attended a service for many years. But I do believe in God. My own practice of religion, you could say, it a nonpractice. I personally feel that it's just as worthy on a weekend to rake the lawns of an elderly neighbor or to climb a mountain and marvel at the beauty of this land we live in as it is to sing hosannas or go to Mass. In other words, I think every many finds his own church- and not all of them have four walls - Judge Haig (Page 399)”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“As it turned out, though, it was a lot easier to say that someone deserved to die for what they did than it was to take the responsibility to make that happen.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“The hardest thing in the world is believing someone can change. It's always easier to go along with the way things are than to admit that you might have been wrong in the first place.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“It's never the differences between people that suprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“I don't know what I was thinking, coming out here. There are no silver bullets in life, there's just the long, messy climb out of the pit you've dug youself.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“You don't make a friend," Jacob said with a scowl. "It's not like they come with directions like you'd find on a box of macaroni and cheese.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“The problem was , you never heard anyone say,"wow, check out the brain on that babe.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“Don't pay back in kind, pay back in kindness. If someone does wrong by you, do right by them.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules
“It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A child was the love you didn't have to look for, didn't have to prove anything to, didn't have to worry about losing. Which is why, when it happened, it hurt so badly.”
Source: The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules