Jamie Lynn > Jamie's Quotes

“What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Passion isn't a path through the woods. Passion is the woods. It's the deepest, wildest part of the forest; the grove where the fairies still dance and obscene old vipers snooze in the boughs. Everybody but the most dried up and dysfunctional is drawn to the grove and enchanted by its mysteries, but then they just can't wait to call in the chain saws and bulldozers and replace it with a family-style restaurant or a new S and L. That's the payoff, I guess. Safety. Security. Certainty. Yes, indeed. Well, remember this, pussy latte: we're not involved in a 'relationship,' you and I, we're involved in a collision. Collisions don't much lend themselves to secure futures...”
― Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

“This is what you do. If you feel low, you stand tall. You mess up, you move on. You want to try something, try it, and if it was a stupid thing to try, you look it in the eye. There's no turning back. You apologize if you're sorry, but know that the nimblest, strongest hands can't rebuild a bridge out of embers, so cut new wood. Start from scratch. You love with your whole heart. If you're jealous, talk yourself from the ledge. If you can't talk yourself down from the ledge, have a good time up there, looking down on the world. If you have to lie to make everything true again, lie like you mean it. If you find yourself in a cage, reach out through the bars for the key, unlock the door, and run away. If running away gets dangerous, run home. If home doesn't mean what it used to mean, decide what home will be in the future. If your best friend says she doesn't trust you, hold her jaw in your hand until it hurts, and make her face you. Thats all it takes. If you think you love a guy, see how his hand looks in yours, thats all it takes. If you get exiled into a new land, then go discover it. And if you feel like you're drowning, go swimming.”
― Hobson Brown

“Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you!”
― Haruki Murukami, Norwegian Wood

“Hey, and for what it's worth? Friends don't leave you alone in the woods. Friends are the ones who come and take you out.”
― Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key

“If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
― Ray Bradbury

“What you have to decide... is how you want your life to be. If your forever was ending tomorrow, would this be how you'd want to have spent it? Listen, the truth is, nothing is guaranteed. You know that more than anybody. So dont be afraid. Be alive.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“I don't know. Just because someone's pretty doesn't mean she's decent. Or vice versa. I'm not into appearances. I like flaws, I think they make things interesting.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“Well, it all comes to this; there's no use trying to live in other people's opinions. The only thing to do is to live in your own. After all, I believe in myself. I'm not so bad and silly as they think me, and I'm not consumptive, and I can write. Now that I've written it all out I feel differently about it. The only thing that still aggravates me is that Miss Potter pitied me -- pitied by a Potter!”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

“I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made fo figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.”
― Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road

“Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you’d let them go. But now I look at you, and I dreamed about Maggie, and I see that I’ve been wrong. If you really love someone, Allie, I think you have to take them back.”
― Jodi Picoult, Mercy

“Love is not an equation... It is not a contract, and it's not a happy ending. It is the slate under the chalk and the ground buildings rise from and the oxygen in the air.”
― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

“There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found.”
― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

“I think you can love a person too much.

You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it's a catch-22: all of those things you're willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you've lost yourself.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“Here's a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we'd rather curl up with someone like Charlotte - a woman who's soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn't feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can't wait to come back to.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.”
― Jodi Picoult, Second Glance

“And oh she had been broken. She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall”
― Jodi Picoult, Second Glance

“Ross believed in past lives. Moreover, he believed that the person you fell in love with in each life was the same person you fell in love with in the life before, and the one before that. Sometimes, you might miss her - she'd be reborn in post-World War I generation, and you wouldn't come back until the fifties. Sometimes, your paths would cross and you wouldn't recognize each other. Get it right - that is: fall madly, truly, deeply - and perhaps there'd be an eternity carved out solely for the two of you.”
― Jodi Picoult, Second Glance

“Regret hung from the hem of everyone's lives, a rip cord reminder that what you want is not always what you get. Look at himself, outliving Aimee. Or Az, trying to find his daughter, only to have her wind up dead. Look at Shelby, with a child who was dying by degrees. Ethan, born into a body nobody deserves. At some point or another, everyone was failed by this world. Disappointment was the one thin humans had in common.
Taken this way, Ross didn't feel quite so alone. Trapped in your whirlpool of what might have been, you might no be able to drag yourself out - but you could be saved by someone else who reached in.”
― Jodi Picoult, Second Glance

“As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“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.”
― Jodi Picoult, House Rules

“On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger's. Like me, they're very smart. And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone.”
― Jodi Picoult, House Rules

“Words, for all they were flimsy and invisible, had great strength. They could be fortified as a castle wall and sharp as a foil. They could bite, slap, shock, wound. But unlike deeds, words couldn't really help you. No promise ever rescued a person; it was the carrying-through of it that brought about salvation.”
― Jodi Picoult, Second Glance

“If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over- only living with the mistakes you've made.”
― Jodi Picoult, Perfect Match

“But as he grew older, he learned that a word was a powerful thing. An insult didn't have to be shouted to bleed; a vow didn't have to be whispered to make you believe. Hold a thought in your head, and that was enough to change the actions of anyone and anything that crossed your path.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“It's crazy, right? To love someone who's hurt you? It's even crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.”
― Jodi Picoult, Plain Truth

“You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain that you're making a mistake.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.”
― Orson Scott Card