Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult

• Anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.
• In the real world, the best circumstances don't always come to be. In the real world, "forever" may only be a weekend.
• I believe in love. I think it just hits you and pulls the rug out from underneath you and, like a baby, demands your attention every minute of the day.
• It's not like marriage is the peak of your life. You can be married, I think, but that doesn't necessarily mean you are in love.
• You can't just keep yourself from falling for a person. You can't turn off your emotions like a faucet.
• When you're with other people living the same life as you, you feel better.
• I will not call to them when I do not know what to say. I won't reveal myself without having anything to show.
• Age differentials tend to become less pronounced as one grows older, but during adolescence, five and a half years is an entire lifetime.
• When you get married, you make the biggest decision of your life; you say you're going to spend eternity with one person. So what do you do if that person leaves? What do you do once you've already committed yourself?
• In this world, there's only one person with whom you are meant to connect. This is a God-woven thread. You cannot change it; you cannot fight it. The person is not necessarily your wife or your husband, your long-term lover. It may not even be a good friend. In many cases it is not someone with whom you spend the rest of your life. I would hazard a guess that ninety percent of all people never find the other person. But those lucky few, those very lucky few, are given the chance to grab the brass ring.
• You have to work with your loose ends and see what you can make of them.
• If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.
• I believe that you can fall in love many times with many different people. However I don't think that you can fall in love the same way twice. One type of relationship may be steady. Another may be fire and brimstone. Who is to say if one of these is better than the other? The deciding factor is how it all fits together. Your love, I mean, and your life. The problem is that when you're old enough to really find a soul mate, you're already carrying around all this extra baggage. Like where you grew up, and how much money you make, and whether you like the country or the city. And sometimes, most of the time, you fall really hard for someone who you just can't squeeze into the limits of your life. The bottom line is: when your heart seats its sight on someone, it doesn't consult with your mind.
• You can tell yourself anything you want, but you can't make what happened go away.

11/4/2011