Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

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 a story for publication.

There] was a time when a lot of people came to the door. The milkman. The iceman. The Fuller Brush man. Encyclopedia salesmen. There was a sense of interaction with the world that started right at your own front doorstep.

It's just words. How can words be dangerous?" "You have a lot to learn about the world, baby girl. Nothing is more dangerous than words." "That's stupid. What about a gun? A gun can kill you dead." "Only your body," Billy said. "It can't kill your soul. Words can kill your soul.

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.

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.

We should all be much more careful with each other`s hearts.

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.

Meaning…they say the best way to judge what a man will do is by looking at what he's done in the past.

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

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes you have to jumpstart the world just to get it to be what even the world admits it should be

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

The value of your life is your own choosing,

People laugh at things they don't understand. It makes them feel safe. But it's a false feeling. They are no safer. They just feel as if they are. The world is full of people too foolish to judge the difference.

That's all addiction really is. It's trading away the future so you can feel OK right now.

But when nobody punishes you, you have to do it yourself, and there's no release date on that. We're always harder on ourselves than any governing body could ever get away with being.

We're all just doing our best.' I left out the second part. 'Even if it doesn't look so good from the outside.

If I was to kill everybody who didn't love me and never would, wouldn't be nobody left on the planet?

I think you're the first person I've ever known . . . I might not say it right. We'll see . . . who really sees me. And I mean the whole thing of me, not just the part that fits with how they want to see me. And it seems weird to me, because the first person I met who really sees me for all of who I am . . . you know . . . can't see.

Don't you dare give up on me.

She was looking at her life. It was the same array of property and belongings she looked at every day. Except you don't look at your life every day. You don't stand a step or two outside it and say to yourself, This is my life. You just walk through it the way she assumed a fish swims through water, never registering it as water. It's just what is.

See, this is why I was by myself all those years. Because as soon as you let people in, they start depending on you. And then, if you can't be everything they think you should be, you've let them down. It's easier not to have anybody around at all.