My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

• When flames are licking at your heels you've got to break a wall or two if you want to escape.
• People who have been backed into a corner will do anything to fight their way to the center again.
• 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 you're making a mistake?
• Half the battle is figuring out what works for you.
• I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere.
• Since when does anyone get the option to do what's easiest?
• A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself.
• A real friend isn't capable of feeling sorry for you.
• There are always sides. There is always a winner, and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.
• If you focus on sandbagging the beachhead, you can ignore the tsunami that's approaching.
• It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you.
• Zebras captivate me. They'd be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that's black or white.
• Helping someone who needs it is the right thing to do.
• What do parents look like? You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across? Like that.
• No matter who you are, there is some part of you that always wishes you were someone else.
• There is a moment during a structure fire when you know you are either going to get the upper hand, or that it's going to get the upper hand on you. You notice the ceiling patch about to fall and the staircase eating itself alive and the synthetic carpet glued to the soles of your boots. The sum of the parts overwhelms, and that's when you back out and force yourself to remember that every fire will burn itself out, even without your help.
• Dark matter has a gravitational effect on other objects. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.
• Nobody ever wants what they've got.
• If you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving.
• That's pretty much the way it goes--fix one leak in the dike just in time to watch another one start spouting.
• There are no guarantees about anything, least of all one's future.
• Why are terms of endearment always foods? Honey, cookie, sugar, pumpkin. It's not like caring about someone is enough to actually sustain you.
• Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in.
• Do all the wonderful things happen when we are not aware of them?
• There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.
• There are some nights when you just want to know there's someone else besides you in this wide world.
• Fortunes were like clay and could be reshaped at any time. But you could only remake your own future, not anyone else's, and for some people that just wasn't good enough.
• You will always be up against someone. Something.
• You ought to be attracted to someone for what they've got inside them, not for the package it's presented in.
• Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.
• Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.
• Time is an optical illusion--never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.
• It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.
• 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.
• When you don't know where you're headed, you find places no one else would ever think to explore.
• Life sometimes get so bogged down in the details, you forget you are living it.
• Sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.
• You have to be able to laugh at yourself, don't you?
• Morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.
• See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.

9/12/2009--12:56 am