Jodi Picoult

Did everyone in jail think they were innocent? All this time Peter had spent lying on the bench, convincing himself that he was nothing like anyone else in the Grafton County Jail—and as it turned out, that was a lie.

Allie had trouble convincing herself that the reason they had gotten married years later did not have to do with the fact that after college, they were two of the few who had come back to Wheelock. Cam had returned because it was expected of him, Allie because there was nowhere else she really wanted to be.”

The enemy was always supposed to be an outsider, not the kid who was sitting right next to you.

When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.

I was terrified of that ghost just like they were, but I never let anyone know it. That way, I knew they might call me a lot of awful names ... but one of them wasn't coward.

Laura Stone knew exactly how to go to hell. She could map out its geography on napkins at departmental cocktail parties; she was able to recite all the passageways and rivers and folds by heart; she was on a first-name basis with its sinners.

It struck Lacy that she didn’t really know what color a chameleon was before it started changing.

Logan Rourke wasn’t her father, not any more than the guy who’d taken their coins at the toll booth or any other stranger. You could share DNA with someone and still have nothing in common with them

Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, … It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

When she had packed all the artifacts that made up their personal history into liquor store boxes, the house became strictly a feminine place. She stood with her hands on her hips, stoically accepting the absence of old Boston Celtics coasters and the tangle of fishing poles, the old dartboard from a Scots pub, the toolbox and downhill skis, the silky patterned ties which sat in the base of one box like a writhing mass of snakes. Without these things, one tended to notice the bright eyelet curtains, the vase filled with yawning crocuses, a needlepoint pillow."

“My daughter won’t go to school this year until eleven o’clock, because she can’t handle being there when third period starts,” the woman said. “Everything scares her. This has ruined her whole life; why should Peter Houghton’s punishment be any less?”

When he gave it to her that day, she’d held it up to the light, turning it back and forth, until his hands had come over hers, stilling. ‘Be careful,’ he had said. ‘It’s fragile. See the soft lead? It bends. It can break.’ She wondered why she had not perceived that conversation then the same way she did now: as a shrill and distant warning.”