Mistakes are like the memories you hide in an attic: old love letters from relationships that tanked, photos of dead relatives, toys from a childhood you miss. Out of sight is out of mind, but somewhere deep inside you know they still exist. And you also know that you're avoiding them.

—Jodi Picoult in Lone Wolf

mind mistakes memories

About Jodi Picoult

Portrait of Jodi Picoult

Jodi Lynn Picoult ( PEE-koh; born 1966) is an American writer. As of 2026, Picoult has published 30 novels, several short stories, and has also written several issues of Wonder Woman. Approximately 40 million copies of her books are in print worldwide and have been translated into 34 languages. In...

More quotations from Jodi Picoult

Things had a way of working out for the best when you let them run their course.

—Jodi Picoult in Plain Truth

You get through it, you just never get over it.

—Jodi Picoult in Plain Truth

moving on healing

Do you know what it's like to give your whole self to a person, and your whole heart to boot, until you've got nothing left to give―and then realize that it still isn't what they need?

—Jodi Picoult in The Pact

Traveling is all very well and good as long as you know there is a place or person you can call home.

—Jodi Picoult in Mercy

home travel place

The scariest thing in the world is thinking someone you love is going to die.

—Jodi Picoult in Lone Wolf

love fear death

More quotations tagged with “memories”

You see, for me, memories are difficult. Very often, they hurt. A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they're inaccessible.

—Casey McQuiston in White & Royal Blue

pain grief absence memories

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

—Helen Macdonald in H is for Hawk

life expectations loss absence memories

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

—Barbara Kingsolver in The Lacuna

Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time.

—Nicholas Sparks in The Wedding

time experience memories

Some days I imagined getting on a bus and leaving this town behind. The memories weren't good. At least most of them weren't.

—Abbi Glines in Because of Low

memories leaving