Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

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.

There is one thing in this life you can never hide, and that's love. When you're in love, you can't disguise that. No one I've known can conceal it, so far as I could tell. It's like that old saying about trying to hide your light under a bushel basket, except in this case all that happens is you get this very shiny basket that glows with a light people can see from miles away.

Thank you. I'm honored. Most people pay very little attention. People are funny, don't you think? I used to play for the philharmonic, and people would pay good money for those tickets. Big money. But I sit out here and play the same music, and most people won't even flip me a quarter as they walk by. Same music. Just a different sense of how much they should value it.

young. Love is when you can make the following statement, and mean it: 'What's best for her, even if it doesn't include me.' Otherwise you just love the way you feel when she's around, and you want to be selfish with that—hang on to it at all costs, even if it harms her.

But you have to let people go through whatever it is they have to go through. Just be there for your friends. That's all we can really do for each other sometimes.

If nothing changes, nothing changes. If you always do what you always did, then you'll always get what you always got. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and every time expecting a different result.

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.

You're supposed to make mistakes. You're just starting out. Mistakes are a good thing. They mean you were brave enough to try something hard.

Life gives us nothing outright. It only lends. Nothing is ours to keep. Absolutely nothing. Not even our bodies, our brains.

I realized I'd been on pins and needles waiting to see how he'd react to being penned up again. I'll never understand that. How can I be on pins and needles and not even know it? It sounds like a thing that shouldn't exist in the world at all, but there it is. It's discouraging to be in the middle of a life that's impossible to explain.

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.

Life gives us nothing outright. It only lends. Nothing is ours to keep. Absolutely nothing. Not even our bodies, our brains. This 'self' that we think we know so well, that we think of as us. It is only on loan. If a person comes into our life, they will go again. In a parting of ways, or because everyone dies. They will die or you will die. Nothing we receive in this life are we

He had still offered me no return address. I couldn't have written back and given him my reaction to his words, even if I had known what to say.

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.

Some things, like innocence, only go one way.

If something works, I figure . . . just leave it alone. Let it be a thing that worked. Not everything needs to be picked apart for better understanding. Sometimes it's okay to just say thank you in the quiet of your head and move along.

If there's one thing I learned growing up, it's that you have to talk to kids a lot, and you have to tell them the damn truth.

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

Of course it landed in my gut to a total panic response, because I wasn't expecting anyone, and didn't seem able to anticipate anything but more trouble. I try not to think that way, but it's more a feeling than a thought, and besides, it's an involuntary response.

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.

This is what we do. We do crazy shit because we're broken. That's who we are. That's what we do.

They had shopping carts full of food and toys, but they looked bored and unhappy. How could a person go to the store, buy everything she needed—and wanted, from the look of some of those carts—and still seem dissatisfied? What more did they need to be happy, then? If all this wouldn't do it?

gaping open, panting. It looked like a toothy smile.

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