Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

A tightening in her chest almost stopped her. It was a foreign feeling, to be so afraid of words addressed to her own son. And, in another very real way, familiar. She had stood at this threshold many times, and each time she had let that clench of fear stop her.

we are bound by a common love, a stronger bond now, as it extends to a common loss.

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.

So I guess the theme of this novel is, "Look for strength in unexpected places." Not only might you find it there, but it might be more beautiful and more hopeful than strength found anywhere else. Here's to strength and healing.

Her body felt like a giant bag of lack. Lack of motivation. Lack of strength. Lack of rigidity. Lack of caring.

She learned so much from these little talks with her son. He always swore he'd learned it from her and was only mirroring it back, but somehow the wisdom of her own advice surprised her as it came out of his mouth, and left her wondering if she was wise enough to heed it.

Changing one's whole modus operandi of communication wasn't as easy as just hearing a piece of advice and then starting over.

Because my father had the equivalent of a few thousand dollars, and their fathers had nothing. Money, my friend. Money bought us our lives. And that is called privilege. We bought our lives, while those who couldn't afford to were slaughtered like animals.

Picture yourself looking back on the decision ten or twenty years down the road. Let's say you try it, and it doesn't work out. How much will you regret it? Now let's say you don't try it, so you never know. Then how much regret?

No good deed goes unpunished, she thought as she stepped into the outer office. Somehow it had fallen to her not only to teach the boy to read, but to heal his traumatic life. And all she had wanted was to buy a few cartons of unusually fresh eggs.

They reminded her what it meant to allow someone into your life. You see something you like in a man, so you ask him in, but what comes in is all of him. Not only the parts you took a liking to, but the many parts that don't fit with you at all. That's always the way it worked

I see my privilege because I have lived both with it and without it. The jury did not even see. They did not even see, Raymond. What can you do with a world where people do not even see?

The things you have to do to handle them. The tagging and roping and throwing them down and castrating them. And then knowing you're sending them off to be slaughtered. I just suddenly didn't have the heart for it anymore.

That's the thing about life, Elliot thought. Whatever just happened, good or bad, it always moves on.

Now, there are silences, and there are silences, especially in the house where we grew up. If we'd ever talked about the silences out loud, I'm sure we'd have had a hundred different words to identify them like the Eskimos do with snow.

Bea was careful to stare down at her beer bottle as she spoke. When she was done the silence reigned again. Bea did not dare look up to see how her admission had been received. She saw one of the men get up from his barstool, but she didn't look over. She could hear someone moving about the room, but did not turn her head to investigate

multiple kids. They always need something, but everything is always happening at once. You know they need you, but there's never much time to follow through. And yet I was the one who'd wanted the big family. The bustling household. Because I'd been an only child, raised by parents who barely spoke, either to each other or to me. So I loved the commotion.

God is not Tinkerbell. He does what he does whether you clap your hands or hide behind the comfort of your disbelief. Besides, you know all this. You just forgot.

Sometimes we have to do things we're scared of. The trick is not to wait until the thing doesn't scare us anymore, because that day might never come. The trick is to do the thing scared.

But I've learned in my life that not everything that happens needs to be talked about. Some things are better left alone.

not how it works. People with really good self-worth think they're the same size as everybody else, and they never make anybody else feel small. Any time somebody tries to act like they're more than you are, deep down they're afraid they're less.

Debt is a terrible, terrible thing. Somehow they've got us all primed to accept it. They've taught us it's part of the American dream or some such nonsense. But it keeps you in chains. The deeper in you get, the more money they make off your misfortune, and the deeper in you get.

Are you doing what your heart says to do?

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?