Top 100 Catherine Ryan Hyde Quotes
#1. People remember what they want to remember and forget what they want to forget. If you told him something was important to you and he forgot to do it, he blew you off.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#2. Here's the problem with unforgivable. The more I research the bodymind, the more I get that the only workable path to workable health is to forgive the unforgivable in spite of its unforgivability. Otherwise we just destroy our own cells with the byproducts of all that hate.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#3. It's like a sheet of blue-lined paper, the kind you write on at school, but with the lines suddenly missing. No structure. Nothing is predictable. Everything that might happen now is new. Sometimes disasters make me feel that way.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#4. A kiss, she thinks, has to be entirely balanced
it has to have a little conflict, a little dialectic, a little revolution.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#5. You know, you think about who you might meet and when they might come. You always know that someday a door will open and in will come the one you've waited for. And then the waiting is done. And the rest of your life can begin. And the minute I looked up and saw you there, I thought, There he is.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#6. Sometime around 2006, I decided I had missed my true calling as a young adult author.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#7. World is full of people so troubled they don't even understand themselves. You could offer them a thousand dollars to explain their motivations, but they can't tell you what they don't know.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#8. After a while you look at a picture and all it helps you remember is the picture. And then it gets kind of memorized and you hardly even see it.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#9. I wasn't into blame. Maybe because I had so much of it directed at me, you know? I guess you can go one of two ways with that. You can reflect it right back out at everybody else, or you can drop out of the whole blame paradigm. I guess I chose not to play the game anymore.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#10. Situations are like that. They take up all the time you used to use for working and eating and sleeping. They soak up your whole life like a black hole in space soaks up the sunlight. And then, where you used to have a life, all you have left is a situation.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#11. Maybe the Zion and Bryce Canyon area. Sedona's like that. Grand Canyon, of course. Glen Canyon. Maybe Escalante and Capitol Reef. Or Arches or Canyonlands.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#13. Anything that lifts responsibility for our actions is addictive, I've found. So really, looking back, I'd have to say that was not the hard moment. The tough bit is always later, when you're held responsible for yourself again, and your life is expected to go on.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#14. All I know is that you can't force yourself to feel something you don't.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#16. I've been known to write 10 pages a day for 10 days running before I take a breath. I am not a disciplined writer. I'm one of those people who laughingly call themselves inspirational writers, which basically means someone who has no control over their own creative process.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#18. I think I have something that belongs to you'. I held out my open hand, the stone resting in my palm. I expected her to take it. Instead she took the whole hand, and held it.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#19. He listened to the occasional creak of Flora's squeaky board, and noticed it sounded lonely. Or maybe that was just him.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#21. It shouldn't matter whether you understand it or not, August. Or whether it would be enough of a challenge for you or not. It's Seth's dream. Not yours.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#23. Blood family, that's something we get dealt. Sometimes we get a bad hand. Not much way around it. You just have to grow up and get more family. The kind you get to pick out yourself.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#24. Man - I think his name was Frank - hauled me out of there and asked who I belonged to, but by then I'd forgotten. By then I thought I belonged to the earth and the sky, and the sharp, pushing blades of grass that grew for me. Simon came and found me in time, and from
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#25. I felt the kiss still there on my forehead. Literally. It was frozen there. I could still feel it. I wanted to bronze it, like people do with baby shoes. I wanted to mount it and hang it over my mantelpiece.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#26. Most big life events are like that. You think they'll be emotionally one-sided, but when you actually get into them, it's always more complex. - Nathan
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#27. It means feelings come through loud and clear whether you express them in words or not. - Nathan
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#28. The more I research the bodymind, the more I get that the only workable path to workable health is to forgive the unforgivable in spite of its unforgivability. Otherwise we just destroy our own cells with the byproducts of all that hate. We
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#29. I feel that the truth is simply the truth. And that to shield someone from it is only a manner of treating that person with a lack of respect.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#30. Immediately he felt a pushback against sharing. These other people were at home. He was not. They'd had time to adjust to the energy of the room and the people, which were familiar to begin with. He had not. He pushed the feeling away again and did it anyway. "My
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#31. Where isn't really the problem. The where isn't to blame for the what.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#33. I'm certainly glad to be getting him back. Which was true, but it didn't feel anything like being happy. In fact, the more I thought about it - well, I didn't think about it, I felt it. You can think about happiness all you want, but it won't get you far. It's not a thinking sort of proposition.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#34. I can live through everything or I can answer for everything, but sometimes both is just too much for one day.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#35. Whether they admit it to you, whether they admit it to themselves, people know where they stand with each other. Virginia
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#36. Not that Bella wasn't pretty. Grace thought she was. But she wasn't thin.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#37. On the way up the walk I took in the weedless border gardens, the two floors of smudgeless windows, and I wondered, when a person does all this, do they have time left over for other things?
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#39. He'd be proud of me for crying, and I cry harder. How do you stop crying, Simon?
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#40. The closer you get to heaven, the less air there is, because when you get to heaven for real, you don't need to breathe anymore.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#41. His grandfather probably would have said that all men feel fear, but cowardly men deny it.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#42. This is what we do. We do crazy shit because we're broken. That's who we are. That's what we do.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#44. That's the thing about this other side we're on. There is no landscape. If you want to see things in any kind of context, you have to pick a context. You have to take one from home.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#47. I know this is going to come as a shock to me, but I am leaving me. Perhaps I'll say I could not have seen this coming, but truthfully things have been wrong between me for some time. Time heals and I'm sure in time I'll build a new life without me
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#48. Holding his own in this difficult environment. That perhaps he was learning he was not as tough as he'd previously thought. And that the situation was making him sullen. But Nat didn't seem to care to discuss the matter. And Nathan remained unwilling to pry.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#49. Sorry doesn't mean shit. Not if you don't plan to stop doing the thing you're so sorry about. There has to be more to amends than just a word. Anybody can say a damn word.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#51. Love always looks nice. I don't really know anyone who doesn't enjoy it when they see it. Anyone who doesn't, I don't really want to know them.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#52. Why be given hours and days if all you want to do is make them go away again?
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#53. But I bet more than half the people in the world right now are worrying about something that really is going to be okay.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#54. I am the way I am. We all are the way we are and I'm not sure any of us really knows why.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#55. Whatever you think your shortcomings are ... you can't just lock yourself in the house so no one can notice or comment. We all have to take ourselves out into the world, flaws and all. And find a way to make the adjustment.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#56. You can do anything you want, so long as you're willing to pay the bill when it comes in.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#57. The drinks were so perfect, so visually artistic. Virginia could honestly believe she would find her salvation in one.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#59. Sex is what you make it, and we have always made do. To assume sex must take place within touching distance seems, to me, limited thinking.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#60. Hard work can sometimes substitute for natural ability, but natural ability almost never makes up for not being willing to do the work.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#61. I suppose we're built with complete free will, and as much as we're capable of depravity, to the same degree we are wired for greatness. Everyone gets to choose, I think. And my challenge is to decide where I'll place the bulk of my attention. What I'll most believe in.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#62. One of the nice things about publishing with Amazon is that the window for marketing is much longer than with a traditional publisher because these titles are not coming off of shelves.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#63. It struck me that this was the second time in a couple of days that just yelling someone's name on the street could have spelled disaster. Then it struck me how wrong that was. To have to keep your life sectioned off like that. A signal that you'd fallen into a bad way to live.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#66. Even though it was beautiful and comfortable, and even though it was the world, it was also a little bit boring.
No, wait. Maybe boring isn't the right word. What's the word I'm wanting here? Lonely. That's it. It was a little bit lonely.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#67. The fact that you don't grasp the meaning of something doesn't mean it has none.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#68. But that never did any good anyway. People learned by what they experienced. It mattered little what anyone said to anyone. The small
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#69. You can't tell someone to pursue their dream only if it's a good match for your own. You can't dictate what dream he should pursue.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#70. They just want to kill the pain. Everybody just wants to kill the pain.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#71. I guess if you're really a friend, you overlook certain things. Its easy to be friends with someone who only says things you want to hear. I guess if you're really a friend, you have to cut a friend some slack.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#72. I seem to remember that Gandhi once said his commitment was to truth, not consistency. - Nathan
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#73. It's really hard to know what's a good idea when you're growing and these ideas don't hold still and neither do you.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#74. Feel that the truth is simply the truth. And that to shield someone from it is only a manner of treating that person with a lack of respect. I'm sure she didn't mean it that way, though. I'm sure she was doing what she thought best.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#75. The world I live in is not all white people, not all straight people, and it's not all people who have their acts together, either.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#76. August briefly tried that on for size. Wondered if he longed for summer because summer made it so much easier to breathe.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#77. I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#78. As authors, we all have to learn not to be reactive to public statements about our books. It's really not our business what each reader thinks of them.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#79. It would be easier if people were just good or bad and that was that.
pg. 313
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#80. They were not children. They had grown into people he knew little about. And they had done so without his help or influence, or even,--for the most part--his witness. It made him feel as though something precious had been taken from him.
pg. 239-40
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#81. There's something about standing on the top of a mountain you personally climbed at great sacrifice.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#82. You can't even begin to heal until it strikes you that something needs healing.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#83. But when I was inside, I was always OK. So I just started staying inside. Like I told you before, it gets to be an addiction.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#84. Everything grows best in oxygen and sunlight except secrets and guilt and regrets. They
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#85. A genuine act of kindness makes me feel like I really am where you cut underneath anything external, and you become what a human being can really be. It's like coming home when you give kindness. Kindness changes us, as human beings,
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#86. people is that we forget that something unexpected can happen at any time.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#87. watching TV and playing solitaire is not a proper life. It's not living. It's killing time, and that's hardly the same. You start asking yourself too many questions when your day is reduced to these rote activities that accomplish nothing. You start to wonder
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#89. August remembered Harvey's words, and when he said good-bye he silently let them go. Released them into their own lives. He wished for their father to stay out of trouble, even if it meant he'd never see the boys again. Because that's just what you do. You let go.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#90. But when nobody punishes you, you have to do it yourself, and there's no release date on that. We're always harder on ourselves than any governing body could ever get away with being.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#91. [Grace talking to Billy.] "It's like people who want to feel only happy but not sad," she said. "It never works. You either feel things or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose. At least, I don't think so.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#93. But when you're already swimming in a sea of humiliation deep enough to drown you, it doesn't matter much if somebody throws in another bucketful. It's not worth it to stop and pay attention to that when you need to keep paddling.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#94. We take all these little calculated risks. All the time. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand nothing goes wrong. And the one time it does, we blame the person who took the risk, tell them they should have known better than to ever do such a thing. Which
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#95. Do you know what forever love is? Pearl taught me. It's when you love somebody so much that no matter what happens that'll never change. Like even if you're gone. It's still the same. Even if you die. You die, but not the love. Not forever love. Know what I mean?
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#97. The shorter your range of vision, the fewer options and changes to trouble you.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#98. People learned by what they experienced. It mattered little what anyone said to anyone.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#99. The divisions of time had gone on vacation, leaving just a crush of constant moments.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#100. You are what you do. That's what I'm trying to tell you. What we do defines us. However we behave, conduct our lives ... that's real. The rest is a story for publication.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
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