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121 " I’ve thought about all the things I could have done differently, and if it would have led to another outcome. But thinking doesn’t change anything, does it? "
― Jodi Picoult , The Storyteller
122 " Hunger, she often tells me, has nothing to do with the belly and everything to do with the mind. "
123 " It is such a heady rush to be the object of someone’s attention in a good way, not as a freak, that I keep forgetting to hide. "
124 " We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it. "
125 " You can keep dividing and dividing and you’ll never entirely get rid of the sourness in your stomach that you taste when you think back to the moment you could have said no "
126 " To be forgiven, the person has to be sorry. In Judaism, that’s called teshuvah. It means ‘turning away from evil.’ It’s not a one-time deal, either. It’s a course of action. A single act of repentance is something that makes the person who committed the evil feel better, but not the person against whom evil was committed. "
127 " You could stop expecting the most awful thing to happen, because it already had. "
128 " I've thought a lot about it: how you can ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom. I've thought about all the things I could have done differently, and if it would have led to another outcome. But thinking doesn't change anything, does it? "
129 " It turns out that the more you repeat the same action, no matter how reprehensible, the more you can make an excuse for it in your own mind. "
130 " No child really chooses his religion; it is just the luck of the draw which blanket of beliefs you are wrapped in. "
131 " If you knew you were going to die, wasn’t it better to choose the time and place, instead of waiting for fate to drop on you like an anvil? "
132 " I had come to see, too, that all my characters and I were motivated by the same inspiration. Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love—well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it. "
133 " Sometimes all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface. "
134 " You’d be surprised how hard it is to get people to believe the truth. I guess that’s because most of the time we don’t want to admit it to ourselves. "
135 " I’d make a snide comment about the youths of america but I’m too impressed by the fact that she’s reading something other than Fifty Shades of Grey. "
136 " Having a family means you’re never alone. "
137 " It doesn’t matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it’s there. "
138 " It is amazing how quickly lies compound. They cover like a coat of paint, one on top of the other, until you cannot remember what color you started with. "
139 " Seems indecisive, doesn't it? Either be a period or be a comma, but make up your mind. "
140 " I release Josef, who collapses to my feet, and confesses not just to all war crimes at Auschwitz but also for being responsible for the colossal mistakes New Coke and Sex and the City 2. "