If you wonder how it feels like to have a disabled-child, this is the best book to answer your question.
Below are some quotes that touched me deeply I wanted to share with you:



1- “Most people who offer their help do it to make themselves feel better, not us. To be honest, I don't blame them. It's superstition: If you give assistance to the family in need... if you throw salt over your shoulder... if you don't step on the cracks, then maybe you'll be immune. Maybe you'll be able to convince yourself that this could never happen to you.” 

2- “Just because you had every right to feel sorry for yourself didn't mean you ever took the opportunity to do so.”




3- “Your soul was stronger than your body, and in spite of what the doctors told me over and over, I always believed that was the reason for the breaks. What ordinary skeleton could contain a heart as big as the whole world?"

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

4- “There are kinds of pain that you can't speak out loud.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

5- “It was no small irony, I thought, that if your bones broke, so did my heart.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

6- “I thought about those pageants, girls too beautiful to be real, tall and thin and plastic-perfect. And then I thought of you, short and stubby and twisted, like a root growing wrong from the trunk of a tree, with a banner draped across your chest.

MISS UNDERSTOOD.

MISS INFORMED.

MISS TAKE.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

7- “It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else's. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party - a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

Below are other quotes I loved from this book

8- “I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.”

9- “Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who wouldn't let go. We live in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.”



10- "Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect.”





11- “I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

12- “Old habits, they died hard. How long until I forgot the temperature of his hands on my skin? Until I didn’t remember the smell of his shampoo? How long until I could not hear the sound of his voice, even when he wasn’t speaking? I tried to store up every sensation, like grain for the winter.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

13- “There are some tragedies that you just can’t get past. Your whole life will never be quite the same, no matter what.”

14- “Didn’t everyone lie? And wasn’t there a difference between, for example, killing a person and telling the police you hadn’t and smiling down at a particularly ugly baby and telling her mother how cute she was? There were lies we told to save ourselves, and there were lies we told to rescue others. What counter more, the mistruth, or the greater good?”





15- “How could you forget that this particular “friend” had seen you naked? Had carried your dreams when you were too tired to? You could paint your history over any way you liked, but you’d always see those first few brushstrokes.”




16- “Sex wasn’t love, and one single, stopgap Band-Aid of a night couldn’t fix a broken marriage.” 


― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care







17- “there was not much distinction between losing a friend and a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumph, and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you’d start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number.”




18- “I tried to remember how he had taste. I hated that I had to pretend I knew, when in reality, it had already faded, like a rose you press into a dictionary under the Qs, hoping you can call back summer at any time, but then in December it’s nothing more than crumbling, brown bits of dried flower.”







19- “Being adopted felt like reading a book that had the first chapter ripped out. You might be enjoying the plot and the characters, but you’d probably also like to read that first line, too. However, when you took the book back to the store to say that the first chapter was missing, they told you they couldn’t sell you a replacement copy that was intact. What if you read that first chapter and realize you hated the book, and posted a nasty review on Amazon? What if you hurt the author’s feelings? Better just to stick with your partial copy and enjoy the rest of the story.”




20- “Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?

Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.”




21- “When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.”






22- “When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn’t contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean.”





23- “Choices are funny things-ask a native tribe that's eaten grubs and roots forever if they're unhappy, and they'll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don't know there's an alternative, you can't miss it.”






24- “Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through. The man you fell in love with years ago might look the same and speak the same and smell the same yet be completely different.”





25- “I think you can love a person too much.

You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.”




26- “People were always saying they’d love any baby that comes along, but that wasn’t necessarily true. Sometimes, it really did come down to the particular child in question. There had to be a reason why blond-haired, blue-eyed babies got plucked out of adoption agencies like rape peaches but children of color and children with disabilities might linger in foster homes for years. What people said they would do and what people actually did were two very different things.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

27- “I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way… people always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But it’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone everything in the world matters a little bit more.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

28- “What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

29- “Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

30- “But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone's expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.”

― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

Which of the above quotes touched you the most? Share Them in the comments below!

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