Top 100 Catherine Ryan Hyde Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Everybody is a good person and a bad person at the same time. The only real variation is in the balance. How much good to how much bad. When a person has a bigger good side, we call him a good person. But it's never absolute.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#3. Whether they admit it to you, whether they admit it to themselves, people know where they stand with each other. Virginia
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#4. Because it proves that you don't need much to change the entire world for the better. You can start with the most ordinary ingredients. You can start with the world you've got.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#5. I can live through everything or I can answer for everything, but sometimes both is just too much for one day.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#6. 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
#7. anymore. Maybe he was even with someone else after all this time. "You really look worried," Pete said. "Relax. Something came up that he
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#10. Where isn't really the problem. The where isn't to blame for the what.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#11. Good to get the truth out into the air," Ham said. "Everything grows best in oxygen and sunlight except secrets and guilt and regrets. They like the dank spaces. Drag them out into the light and they fail to thrive." We
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#12. 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
#13. When I dreamed about the time you would actually sleep with me, I thought there'd be some sleeping involved.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#14. Not that Bella wasn't pretty. Grace thought she was. But she wasn't thin.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#15. 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
#16. you can't change anybody's mind. The sooner I learned that, the happier my life would be, and now I felt like a happy life was a goal again for the first time in a long time.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#17. If there's some hidden part of me that thinks like that, I'd rather not go searching for it. - Nathan
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#18. It means feelings come through loud and clear whether you express them in words or not. - Nathan
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#19. 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
#21. 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
#22. [Rayleen talking to Billy.] "Grace is thriving here, and I dare anybody to challenge that. Anybody who has a problem with that can come take it up with me."
"Thank God," Billy said, "because I really hate it when people come take things up with ME.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#23. I don't know if war is always pointless," she said. "I know it's always tragic.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#25. 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
#26. Maybe she doesn't want to understand things she doesn't think she can change anyway. Maybe sometimes you just have a couple of rotten choices. Like you can fail to comprehend the world you've got, or you can see it as this ugly, evil, dangerous place and not be able to do a damn thing about it.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Then, yes. It's civilized. What a man eats, he should be willing to kill. It's not absolutely necessary that he do so, but he should at least be willing to face the reality of it. To eat a chicken only if it comes from the market is the height of cowardice and denial. Someone still had to kill it.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#31. I think it's the things we don't talk about that make us old before out time.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#32. Accepting things. That's what the talk was about. About how insane it is to try to pretend something isn't a certain way, or that you can make it another way, just because you don't like it.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#33. I loved pain, followed it, thought it would cleanse me, right my wrongs.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#34. 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
#37. 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
#38. If you meet someone you don't like, or who doesn't treat you right, try to reserve judgment, because you don't know what that person's going through, and it's probably not so much about you at all.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#41. 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
#42. His grandfather probably would have said that all men feel fear, but cowardly men deny it.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#43. 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
#44. He'd be proud of me for crying, and I cry harder. How do you stop crying, Simon?
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#46. I have a number of questions. If I had half as many answers, I'd be in great shape.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#48. knew I was being too talky. I could hear it. I felt around for the off switch but never found it. Not that I think he cared. I was being too talky for me.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#49. What's weird is when you mean a lot more to somebody else than they ever meant to you. I mean, a whole lot more. Like life on two whole different planets.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#50. 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
#51. My threshold for human contact had worn painfully thin. I felt like a car that had been running its lights too long on battery alone. I felt fresh out of charge, and as though I needed to plug in for days before I could have one more conversation with one more human being.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Esta bien," Clara called back. They sat in silence a while longer. "You seem pretty relaxed," she said to Billy. "Pretty
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#55. 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
#56. I decided that not talking is like a litmus test for a real friend. You can just sit there and be. Not always be filling up the air with words
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#57. 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
#58. Sometime around 2006, I decided I had missed my true calling as a young adult author.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#59. I just feel like it's our job to take care of them. You know? And when you take care of someone, you should love them the way they are. Not try to make them different.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I wondered if a white person could ever comment on the minority experience and get it right.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#64. 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
#65. I learned a valuable lesson from that editorial experience, and it's served me well in just about every dealing I've had with editors since. If they say there's a problem, they're probably right. Believe them.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#66. I guess it's hard for people who are so used to things the way they are - even if they're bad - to change. 'Cause they kind of give up. And when they do, everybody kind of loses.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#67. 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
#68. But I've learned in my life that not everything that happens needs to be talked about. Some things are better left alone.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#69. 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
#70. Don't you wonder sometimes why so much gets heaped on certain people?" I almost told the truth. That truth being, "I wouldn't dare." I wouldn't dare dwell on a thing like that. I try to look forward in my life. Because what's behind me is a little hard to take.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#71. Not everybody who marries in the church and has a family the old-fashioned way is unhappy." "No, but some are. And even if it's just hit-and-miss . . . even if anybody can fall through the cracks, it's still not what I thought I was buying into at all. It still all feels like it makes no sense.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#72. 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
#74. He knew then why his voice had abandoned him. Because it takes courage to talk to people.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#75. If you want to see a man come to his senses, try something like, Do you happen to carry a rubber in your wallet? Did I mention I'm not on the pill?
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#77. 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
#79. 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
#80. A dream has more than one owner. It belongs to everyone it may choose to touch. Whomever it concerns.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#82. Nathan had never liked anger. It seemed a barbaric and undignified emotion. He knew it always masked fear or hurt, and had often wished everyone could simply be sensible enough to cut out the middleman.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#83. 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
#84. Ah, yes. That. The sin of being happy or excited. According to my father, we must guard carefully against such things. According to my father, these emotions are the equivalent of dancing on out fifth-floor window ledge. Clearly inviting a nasty fall.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#85. I no longer think I lack judgment about men. I will never again say my instincts are poor, no sir, because how do I keep finding this same guy over and over? I am beginning to think I have a very keen sense of judgment, only it would seem that it is on somebody else's side.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#86. 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
#87. I really only have been seriously writing, finishing things and publishing things since January '91.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#89. Feelings are a funny thing, he realized. They're always more tangled and contradictory and complex than we want them to be. Than we care to admit.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#90. Everybody is careful these days to maintain just the right attitude toward the war effort.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#91. 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
#93. Once you throw down that gauntlet of ultimatum, the "one more thing" will happen. Nat figured it probably wouldn't even matter much what it was. It would be the straw that broke her. And it had been defined. Prepared for. So it would happen. It was only a matter of time.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#95. All I know is that you can't force yourself to feel something you don't.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#96. 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
#98. She still didn't like the idea. But she wouldn't question me again. She placed the judgment of her humans ahead of her own, as a matter of courtesy and pride, even if she was always right and we were always wrong. Good dogs are like that.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#100. You want to be OK right now, so you trade that for having a good life in the long run. It's a bad trade, but people do it all the time. That's all addiction really is. It's trading away the future so you can feel OK right now.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
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