Six Interesting Quotations from The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult

The mother in the novel tells her graduate class, "I like the word evil. Scramble it a little, and you get vile and live. Good, on the other hand, is just a command to go do." After class a student points out another possibility. He says, "Veil. It's another anagram for evil - the things we hide." (Chapter 1)

And this in chapter 3: the mother, holding her daughter after a family scare, thinks, "It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn't."

From Chapter 4: It wasn't what they had said to each other but what they hadn't: that forgiving and forgetting were fused together -- flip sides of the same coin -- and yet they couldn't both exist at the same time. Choosing one meant that you sacrificed seeing the other."

Later in Chapter 4: A week after Trixie fails at committing suicide, it "occurred to her that had things ended differently a week ago ,she might not be doing any of this. She'd been so focused on what she had wanted to get away from in this owrld she forgot to consider what she might miss."

Again in Chapter 4: Relationships always sounded so physically painful: You fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars? The problem with marriage -- or maybe its strength -- was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being.

In Chaper 6: In The Inferno, sins of passion and despair were't nearly as damning as sins of treachery. Sinners in the upper circles of hell were guilty of indulging their own appetites, but without malice toward themselves or others. Sinners in the middle levels of hell had committed acts of violence toward themselves or others. The deepest level of hell, though, was reserved for fraud -- what Dante felt was the worst sin of all. There was betrayal to family -- those who killed kin. There was betrayal to country -- the double agents and spies of the world. There was betrayal to benefactor - Judas, Brutus, Cassius, and Lucifer, all of whom had turned against their mentors. ..... Laura realized that there was a sin that Dante had left out, one thing that belonged in the very deepest pit of hell. If the worst sin of all was betraying others, then what about people who lied to themselves?