Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

It's always 'something is lost, but something else is gained.

Sometimes when justice is not close at hand, people are quick to tell you that you will simply have to wait -- that until the people standing on your neck feel more comfortable standing elsewhere, you have no choice but to be patient. They talk of this like it shouldn't be all that much of an inconvenience for you. But how do you hand a person back the time that was taken from him?

I have sad. But that's not the same as problems. Problems are something you have to figure out a way to solve. You can't solve sad.

Neither one is any way to grow up.

It's a disgusting process, emptying our stomachs.

I told you before, it gets to be an addiction. 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. That's what your mom is doing. And that's what got me. There's really quite a lot of it going around.

Life just rolls on, adjusting to whatever was subtracted.

I sat there and listened to every word, but it didn't really add up to something coherent to me. Maybe my brain was too busy, or maybe you have to know the legal system, or both.

was important to feel at home while at home.

I'm just a human, among billions of other humans, and I'm alive, and it's really hard being alive, and I don't want to admit it, because nobody around me is admitting it, and most of the time I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm scared.

They're right next door." "We can still hike out down the Angels Landing

Living long is a gift denied to many, and so it comes with a responsibility to make the most of it. At very least to appreciate it. People gripe about growing older—their aches and pains, how much harder everything is—as if they had forgotten that the alternative is dying young." She picked up her fork

Not that I don't get where she's coming from. But when you're nervous and somebody else is nervous, too, you feel like you want them to help you stay calm. Maybe it's not a reasonable request, but you do. Otherwise their nervous kind of stands on the shoulders of your nervous, and then the whole nervous thing is so big and tall that it gets to be too much nervous for anybody to bear.

I don't think she meant any harm." "I'm sure she didn't. But people do plenty of harm when they didn't mean any. It happens all the time.

got that when a person is rude and abusive to me, it's not about me at all. They can say something terrible to me or about me, but they're revealing themselves, not me. It has nothing to do with me. They're just showing me the landscape on the inside of themselves as they project it out onto somebody else. Does that make sense?

First I think, how weird is this? Sitting in the park holding hands with a complete stranger. Then I decided that there are a lot of weird things in the word, and this is not the very worst of them.

It was that ugly moment when you had to back up through time inside your head, and reframe everything you thought you knew about somebody. You had to revise reality after the fact. At least the reality you thought you knew.

Here's what I think about dying: I think it's not so much about being and then not being. I think it's more about where you are. Not whether you are.

The door swung wide,

bruised, a battered internal condition that figuratively showed on the outside. Like someone had beaten her within an inch of her life in some ingenious way that left no marks.

It seems important," she says. "It just doesn't seem wrong.

We did exactly what we were supposed to do." "Us?" he asked. "Yes. Us. We did exactly what our parents taught us. We got married in the church, and we tried to have a bunch of kids. We lived the life everybody told us was right. And now look at us. Tina is gone. We're apart. Why did we do just what we were supposed to do if it wasn't even going to make us happy?

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.

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.