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41 " slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths. "
― Jodi Picoult , A Spark of Light
42 " But I do know that my own shittiest days were usually followed by better ones. "
43 " Once, when her brothers had been fighting over who got more spaghetti for dinner, her mother had said, You don’t look at another person’s plate to see if they have more than you. You look to see if they have enough. "
44 " We may not see eye to eye, but we can respect each other’s opinions and find the truth in them. Perhaps in those honest conversations, instead of demonizing each other, we might see each other as imperfect humans, doing our best. —Jodi Picoult, March 2018 "
45 " It seemed to Wren that having a mother had a lot less to do with a few sweaty hours of labor and delivery, and a lot more to do with whose face you always looked for in a crowd. "
46 " Suddenly Izzy’s future no longer seemed impossible. It felt like the stamp of a passport when you reached your own country, and realized that the only reason you’d traveled was to remember the feeling of home. "
47 " Boy, she told Louie, don’t you let nobody tell you who you can’t be. "
48 " Your religion should help you make the decision if you find yourself in that situation. But the policy should exist for you to have the right to make it in the first place. When you say you can’t do something because your religion forbids it, that’s a good thing. When you say I can’t do something because your religion forbids it, that’s a problem. "
49 " The reason you hold on to someone too tightly isn’t always to protect them—sometimes it’s to protect yourself. "
50 " over five thousand years ago, in ancient China, mercury was used to induce abortions (although it most likely also killed the women). The Ebers Papyrus from 1500 B.C. mentioned abortions. He showed a slide of a bas relief from the year 1150 decorating the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where a woman in the underworld was getting an abortion at the hands of a demon. "
51 " if the only love you had ever known was conditional, so was the absence of it. "
52 " Revenge, in theory, throbbed with adrenaline and was clean with conviction. In reality, it was rushing into a house on fire, and forgetting to map out your exit. "
53 " What love looked like was this: fledgling and unsteady, fierce and soft-shelled at the same time. "
54 " Even if you placed moral value on that fetus, you couldn’t give it rights unless they were stripped away from the woman carrying it. Perhaps the question wasn’t When does a fetus become a person? but When does a woman stop being one? "
55 " by better ones. "
56 " When it came down to it, at the end, you did not think. You felt. What did she feel? That you will never cease to underestimate yourself. That love is fleeting. That life is a miracle. "
57 " Indeed, when pro-lifers came to him to terminate a pregnancy and told him that they did not believe in abortion, Louie Ward said only one thing: Scoot down. "
58 " The brain can do a lot of things,” Olive said, “but it can’t distinguish between what’s really happening, and what you’re imagining. That’s why scary movies scare you and why you cry at Nicholas Sparks books. "
59 " It felt so normal, so similar to her own parents’ behavior, that she made the mistake of thinking she and Parker actually did have common ground. "
60 " Nobody is trying to say it’s all right to kill a child in place of an embryo. This is about allowing the embryo to be born and—” “Exactly. Thank you for proving my point. No one truly believes that an embryo is equivalent to a child. Not biologically. Not ethically. Not morally. "