Brian Fitzgerald Quotes

“When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest.
Darkness, you know, is relative.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“In the end, though, I did not kill my sister. She did it all on her own.

Or at least this is what I tell myself.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Things don't always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find you're looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close proximity.

There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.

Make of it what you will.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Sara," I ask finally, "what do you want from me?"

"I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like," she says thickly. "I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back."

But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky.

To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“You don't have to say anything if you don't want to."

Anna lies down, her head pillowed against my shoulder. Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas—a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“But kids don't stay where they're supposed to. You turn around and find her not in the bedroom but hiding in a closet; you turn around and see she's not three but thirteen. Parenting is really just a matter of tracking, of hoping your kids do not get so far ahead you can no longer see their next moves.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“There is a point when a structure fire is raging out of control that you simply have to give it the distance to burn itself out. So you move back to safety, to a hill out of the wind, and you watch the building eat itself alive.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Here is the recipe to blow something up: a Pyrex bowl; potassium chloride—found at health food stores, as a salt substitute. A hydrometer. Bleach. Take the bleach and pour it into the Pyrex, put it onto a stove burner. Meanwhile, weigh out your potassium chloride and add to the bleach. Check it with the hydrometer and boil until you get a reading of 1.3. Cool to room temperature, and filter out the crystals that form. This is what you will save.

[...]

You need 56 grams of these reserved crystals. Mix with distilled water. Heat to a boil and cool again, saving the crystals, pure potassium chlorate. Grind these to the consistency of face powder, and heat gently to dry. Melt five parts Vaseline with five parts wax. Dissolve in gasoline and pour this liquid onto 90 parts potassium chlorate crystals in a plastic bowl. Knead. Allow the gasoline to evaporate.

Mold into a cube and dip in wax to make it waterproof. This explosive requires a blasting cap of at least a grade A3.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper