Catherine Ryan Hyde Quotes

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.

Can't make the world alcohol-free, and I wouldn't try. Those are things I can't control. But I control my home. And when I walk into the dining room or the kitchen and find an open bottle of booze in my living space, that's over the line. It has nothing to do with judging anybody else. I just know how I want to live in my own home.

And the looks on their faces were caught just right. You could see them loving dancing and loving each other. The expressions just said it all.
It was so nice to look at. I was even able to stand outside the fact that it was Molly and Frank and enjoy the look of love on their faces.
Love always looks nice.

Sometimes when things happen you just let them go, one by one, because it's easier. You pretend they don't mean as much as they do. I should've had my eyes open about that, but you can't go back and second-guess things. It's just that when we sat around and thought about the things we really loved, which you do when you're away at war, mostly what came to me were experiences.

Not a bad life's work.

Even if we had to go back, I decided it was worth it to ride that bus all the way out here. It was worth it just for Natalie to see the windmills. Even if she never saw anything like this again. Maybe at least she could hang on to the idea that there's something better out there, somewhere.

Hmm," he said. "Like the world is big again. No. Not again. Like I only thought it had gotten small while I was inside, but now I see it was big the whole time, just waiting out there. Waiting for me to come back.

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.

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.

It depends how important it is to them to see things differently.

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.

Ethan tries not to look back on that night. At least, as much as human nature allows. But it's a funny thing about your darkest moments. They have a life of their own. They come around because they've got you pinned. Because they can. The harder you try to push them back into the shadows, the stronger they grow. They draw power from your resistance.

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

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.

Of course, Nathan

Esta bien," Clara called back. They sat in silence a while longer. "You seem pretty relaxed," she said to Billy. "Pretty

Everything in the world is easier to clean up after than your own actual damn life.

Speed showering. Speed shaving. Speed dressing. Then it hit me. What a waste of energy. It was all for nothing. I was going to miss that meeting no matter what I did. I could be on the platform right now, waiting for the PATH train, and it would still be a no-go. I could be on the train, heading out of the station, and it still wouldn't work. So I took a minute for four or five gulps of too-hot coffee, which had already brewed on a timer. I wanted to call Sturgis and tell him I'd be late and I was sorry. But by then it was almost 8:35 a.m., and I thought it would be worse to interrupt his meeting. Crap. Crap. Crap. This was the worst. The absolute worst. The worst possible thing that could have happened to me. The job meant more to me than anything, than my own life, than the world. Why did I keep screwing up like this?

Maybe the school was the problem, August thought. Maybe everybody wants a science lesson if they're sitting in the middle of one of the greatest geothermal wonders of the world. Maybe we've removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care. Maybe it's not the kids' fault. Maybe we made the first mistake.

The divisions of time had gone on vacation, leaving just a crush of constant moments.

Everything grows best in oxygen and sunlight except secrets and guilt and regrets. They

The people with the least to give always give the most.

Because if you take something you're a thief.' She nursed the silence a moment. Downed the balance of her drink and silently signaled for another. 'Sounds simple, but you'd be amazed how many people don't get it. They steal but they call themselves honest. They cheat on their spouses and lovers but they think they're good people. They lie but they'd never call themselves liars. Well, let me tell you something, Todd ... She pointed toward him with her right hand, with her lit cigarette. He leaned away slightly. She looked into the mirror of his eyes and saw herself going too far. '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 just a story for publication.

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.

I try to think of a way to get there without going past it. There are lots of ways, but they all have me walking a little farther. And that's stupid, I decide. What am I, a little kid? I can stand to see something it hurts to want. I can see it and then just keep walking. It happens to lots of people everyday. We all survive.

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

August briefly tried that on for size. Wondered if he longed for summer because summer made it so much easier to breathe.

The moon taught me that only madness is pure. Once I'd made a start without it, my life was trodden territory, never really mine. At first I found this depressing, a sense of loss I could barely feel but which sapped me. In time I grew used to the feeling, which made it possible to bring more feet into my impure mind to track things up. If I couldn't go back, I might as well go forward. I

The value of your life is your own choosing, Nathan

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.

If you can't pay it back, pay it forward.

But the moon doesn't say what it knows.

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.

You can only wrestle with something for just so long. Then you have to break in one direction or another. Just to end the wrestling. Something has to give.

I think it's the things we don't talk about that make us old before out time.

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.

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.

I'd tell you to be careful, except for two things. One, it wouldn't do any good anyhow. And two, I think we tell each other that too much. Be careful. Don't get hurt. Don't take changes. Don't try anything. Don't feel. Might as well be telling each other not to be alive at all. Boils down to the same thing.

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.

[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.

I don't think you feel much of anything anymore.

I didn't sleep well that night. I lost most of the night thinking about it. What does it mean when someone loses the use of most of his brain, and it makes him more kind?

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.

Don't you dare give up on me.

It's one thing to know the right path and another thing to take it.

You have to dance especially at a time like this. That's the whole point. The dancing will bring you back into the moment. It's the dance that will save you.

And then, every time I didn't see her, there was a fall involved. I thought about dancing on the fifth-floor ledge outside out apartment. Every train she wasn't on felt something like hitting the pavement from five floors up. So maybe my father was right about that. Maybe happiness and excitement really are dangerous things.

You worry too much. You think you have to do too much. Like you think you're always just about to make some terrible mistake. There's nothing wrong with wanting to learn to dump the tanks. There's nothing wrong with making coffee for me or walking the dog. It's nice. But I get a feeling you're doing it because you always feel like you need to do more. To be more. Like if you don't make yourself useful, you're not entitled to the air you breathe.

Star had Comet haltered and out of his corral, his lead rope tied to the top rail of the fence, and she was raking out the manure and small stones with amazing care, so that no square inch of dirt was left ungroomed. She had just led him out and tied him to the rail. She made it look so easy. Was it really so easy? Every time she had been here working, I'd stayed close and watched

I really only have been seriously writing, finishing things and publishing things since January '91.

Why be given hours and days if all you want to do is make them go away again?

The fact that you don't grasp the meaning of something doesn't mean it has none.

Nothing's more dangerous than a girl,

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.

He says the part that's driving us crazy is trying to fix a future that isn't even here yet. He says when it gets here, then we can figure out how to get through it. But now it's just driving us crazy because it's all unknown. So we just have to stay in the moment we're in. You know. Take things on one moment at a time.

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.

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.

I've practiced "alone" a lot, and I'm good at it.

I keep telling you the future isn't set in stone. It's not all decided yet. The future is just what's down the road we decided to walk on today. You can change roads anytime. And that changes where you end up.

We take things on a little at a time because all at once they'd kill

people is that we forget that something unexpected can happen at any time.

Science lesson?" he asked. "Yeah!" both boys shouted at once. They looked up at him with eager faces. August wondered if his job would be different if kids looked up at him with eager faces. And if even these two kids would have been the slightest bit eager for a science lesson if they had been in school. Maybe the school was the problem, August thought. Maybe everybody wants a science lesson if they're sitting in the middle of one of the greatest geothermal wonders of the world. Maybe we've removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care. Maybe it's not the kids' fault. Maybe we made the first mistake. "I'll

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.

We do crazy shit because we're broken.

I think you can scare somebody out of doing something, but not out of feeling like they want to.

I think about the time Mitch asked me why I was such a happy little guy. I was five years old. Pearl had been gone a few weeks. I thought really hard for an answer even though I think he'd gone about his business without expecting one.
Then I said, "I think it's because my mother loves me so much."
He gave me this look of utter pity, like I was the bravest kid in the world. He missed the point completely, you know?

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.

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,

People die of love. I'm one of the few who'll admit it. That doesn't mean it isn't true.
Take all the people who died yesterday, or last week, or last year. Subtract all the suicides and the so-called accidents of the brokenhearted. Take away the men who got blown away for being in the wrong bed at the wrong moment, the women in abusive marriages who died of cancer because they couldn't find any other exit from their lives. All the AIDS deaths except from the needles and the transfusions, the ones they call the innocent victims. Like if you have sex, you're guilty. Deserved just what you got.
Now tell me who all you've got left.
Without love the world would be overpopulated, except that without love it wouldn't be populated at all. Love giveth and love taketh away and all that crap. You'll probably say all those people died from the lack of love, but I say it's two sides of the same coin. So it's the same coin.

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?

There was something peaceful about an untouched fall of snow. Like being in another world, where nothing can go wrong. Because nothing can find you.

At the very bottom of human experience comes a set of certain privileges, a special zone where the rules apply to everyone else except you. It was good of the world to build itself that way, and include that tiny consolation prize for those who have nothing else to recommend their lives in that moment. The

So you're saying you don't feed something in a situation where it would be a big disaster for it to grow.

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.

All I know is that you can't force yourself to feel something you don't.

There's something about standing on the top of a mountain you personally climbed at great sacrifice.

The shorter your range of vision, the fewer options and changes to trouble you.

No happy marriage was, in his estimation, ever based on thoughtless, automatic untruths and exclusions. And the best way to make someone unhappy, if not downright unbalanced, is to tell her that what she sees with her own eyes is not there at all.

As long as I live, I'm never going to do what they're doing. I made myself a promise. And now I'm making the promise to you. I'm never going to judge somebody I don't know. And if somebody is accused of something in the newspaper or on TV, I'm going to remember that maybe he did it or maybe he didn't. I wasn't there, so I don't know.

The drinks were so perfect, so visually artistic. Virginia could honestly believe she would find her salvation in one.

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.

Gandhi once said his commitment was to truth, not consistency.

Grownups have a tendency to talk themselves out of things, saying it will never work, but kids are fabulously optimistic.

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.

So, I guess people figure it's not as hard to lose your mother when you never got along anyway. But they're wrong. They're dead wrong. It's always hard to lose your mother. Always. If you loved her, if you hated her. If she smothered you, if she ignored you. It doesn't matter. She's your mother. Your mother. That's just a very tough bond to break.

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.

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

You can't even begin to heal until it strikes you that something needs healing.

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.

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.

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.

took her hands away from her face. It was hard to do. She knew she looked a wreck. But if you can't trust a man to look at your real face and not run screaming, what good is it to have him around in the first place?

But that never did any good anyway. People learned by what they experienced. It mattered little what anyone said to anyone. The small

You can do anything you want, so long as you're willing to pay the bill when it comes in.

I was a mean old woman. I'd never meant to be, but it was unquestionable that I was. Up until that moment, I'd half known, but I hadn't cared what other people thought of me. I guess I cared what Vern thought, but somehow I'd considered him grandfathered in. I guess I'd thought he had to put up with me regardless. I cared what Denny and Bobby thought of me,

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.

He's my dad. I love him. It's not that I don't love him. I really do. And I know I need to stick with him and try to help him. And I'd miss him. I know I would. I'd miss him and I'd miss home. I don't even really know why I said that. Well . . . yeah, I sort of do. It's just different with August. Not like he's perfect. But like you know what's going to happen next, and it makes sense. And even when it doesn't work like that, I can just say so to him . . . and then we talk about it and then things make sense again. I talk to my dad all the time but nothing ever changes. It's like everything I say just sort of bounces off him. But when August and I talk, stuff actually gets worked out. And it's such a relief.

Everybody is careful these days to maintain just the right attitude toward the war effort.

But Paying It Forward is about spontaneously offering favors, not needing to say yes when someone asks too much of you. And also, it's about kindness rather than niceness. There's a difference. Kindness is spontaneous and real. Niceness just mostly wants to be liked.

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.