Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

I'm trying to learn to be a nicer person.

death is the most helpless and irrevocable of states.

All guidance springs from an ability within yourself—if only the ability to be guided.

I trotted down all three flights of stairs feeling weirdly happy. My sister was back. And at least I had one sort-of friend. You have to have gotten down pretty low before something as small as that starts to look like happy to you.

Sometimes when a kid's got nobody really running things in his life, he'll decide to take over and take charge of everything. Otherwise the world just seems to be spinning out of control. That seem to hit a note in you?

Shades of me, he thought. Did other people react so violently to the overwhelm of their emotion? News to him. He'd lived his life quite sure he was the only one. Billy

the soul of the animal, as I've read that Native Americans do. It strikes me as a form of grace. Saying grace. Or just being grace. I am still on the Navajo Nation, wishing Navajo grace traveled with me on this land, or that Everett had packed some with my dried beef. But I don't go so far as to complete the ritual. I say a word or two of apology out loud,

This is not promiscuity on my part, not at its roots; more that so few women will make concessions to the HIV-positive male that I am forced to do far more than my share.

It made me feel unsalvageable, as though I had been born unlikable and had no hope for being any other way now.

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

We either grow up to be our mother or we make a solemn vow to the universe to be her polar opposite. Doesn't work every minute of every day, though.

Simon taught me to face financial needs as they arise. Never short current obligations for those you can't even see yet.

Pain had simply become a condition he had no expectation of living without.

Sometimes you have to close yourself up. Shut the portals into the places inside you that still know how to feel. Because there's just nothing you can do.

he slings me up to Yozzy's back. I ease gently down onto her. After all, it is her back. Not a motorcycle seat, or a bale of straw, but the fine vertebrae of a sentient being.

that's more or less the textbook definition of an alcoholic. Someone who knows it's time to cut down but can't.

Part of resetting your life is accepting where you are in your life right now.

The story of my life in two sentences: I need time to sort all this out. I'm not going to get it. It was one of those patterns that just kept cropping up. Every time it showed its ugly face, it won.

I couldn't just keep walking through some crap like this, like it never happened. Like everything was fine. Every now and then you need to call a time-out. Get your breath back.

No such thing as too truthful," I said.

looking back, every moment feels equally important. Now the most tedious and uneventful day I ever spent feels like a gift. Now I'm holding those moments like a heaping double handful of pearls, and at the same time I'm admiring their beauty, I have to open my hands and let them pour through.

So if you run around putting a pillow under people to cushion their fall . . . well, I'm just not sure it's quite the favor we think it is." They stood quietly a moment,

But I've seen a lot of people walk a lot of roads. Some not so happy. And it makes them what they are. So if you run around putting a pillow under people to cushion their fall . . . well, I'm just not sure it's quite the favor we think it is.

Damn shame to have to go to heaven and tell Saint Peter you forgot to live while you had the chance.