Monday, July 23, 2007

Vanishing Acts


by Jodi Picoult

Started: 10 July 2007
Finished: 20 July 2007

Overall Assessment/Synopsis: Hardly Picoult's best. Interesting. Wouldn't read again or recommend. About a young woman who discovers her father kidnapped her as a four year old and brought her up under an alias in New Hampshire although her mother was alive and living in Arizona; plot covers her discovery of the crime, the trial and its impact on all involved.

Memorable quotes listed below:

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering! -Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo (p71)

Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered. -Cicero (p133)

Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't see them clearly? (p154)

Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have done both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance. (p159)

I never stopped hoping that you'd come home, but I did stop expecting it. (p163)

Memories aren't stored in the heart or in the head or even in the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any two given people. (p225)

It is also a terrifying prospect: that the relationships we use as the cornerstones of our personalities are not given by default but are a choice; that it's all right to feel closer to a friend than we do to a parent; that someone who betrayed us in the past might be the same person with whom we build a future. (p231)

...it's crazy, isn't it, the way we always say that children belong to their parents, when it's really the other way around? (p280)

Why do they call it a mobile home if it never goes anywhere? (p388)
**

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