Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

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." Billy

The other part of it was that sometimes you just have to take a chance on something, because otherwise you definitely end up with nothing. You just have to be a brave girl sometimes, like I told the baby a thousand times that night.

any book incapable of offending someone isn't worth the time it takes to read it.

I almost said I was never mad, I just sort of didn't care. But I didn't say it, because I started to know that it probably wasn't true. I was probably plenty mad without really knowing. And I probably did care. It takes me a long time, sometimes, to figure out how something is supposed to feel.

You can heal your own self first, but most people never do. Maybe because you have to start by admitting you're broken.

I don't read you." I guess I didn't really expect him to. Because I'd never told him the beginning of the conversation. I hoped that didn't mean I was getting to be more like my mom.

Just on the inside, though," Seth said. "Like in my chest. Like I breathe air into my chest, and there's more space in my lungs than before. But not my lungs really. I just feel like there's more room inside me than there used to be.

Thought about how afraid everyone is of change, and how sure they feel that their adaptation to change cannot, will not, happen. Then something new comes along, and a couple of weeks later it feels as though life has been exactly that way since the beginning of recorded time.

And I knew that my only way through this mass of simultaneous future outcomes was to hold tight to the idea that it was possible to get to OK from where we were now. Not assured. Just possible.

But some people don't want you to do what you think is right. Some people

Right," Raymond said, realizing he was in prison. That his inability to express what he was feeling had formed such a tight and inescapable box around his being that he could barely breathe.

You can always tell what someone loves, because they pay attention to it. No matter what you say you love, what you really love is what you put the most time into.

people want you to do what they think

Unlike Ed, she listened. But then she forgot.

But some of my favorite parts of me are the parts you don't understand. I don't mean to be hurtful. I'm not saying it in an angry way. I wish we fit together better, too. But I'm not going to change the best of me just because you don't get it.

They made you miss one breath, no matter how many times you'd seen them. He didn't speak.

Raymond opened his mouth to say something. But he was still unclear on what the something would be. Part of him wanted to express what a big deal it was. Bigger than her words had tried to make it out to be. But it seemed unlikely that he would say a thing like that. He never had before.

After all, you can't know what's happening inside a person while they stare. You can only imagine. And imagination can be a highly fear-based phenomenon.

I think it's the things we don't talk about that make us old before our time.

Here's what I do. I say to my creator, 'I'm

Here the world is full of all these men trying to model what it means to be a man, but they don't truly know. They think it means be tough, feel nothing, betray nothing. And then Luis comes along and decides that his definition of a man is someone who is not afraid to be kind. That takes courage.

The longer you live, the more you'll see that the inside of everybody is a lot like the inside of everybody else. If you're feeling something, more likely than not it's just what anyone would feel.

Raymond expected them to ask why he wanted to know, or who this Luis Velez was to him. Something that showed an interest, or a connection. Then, a moment later, he wondered why he had expected it. After all these years.

Sometimes stuff just happens, you know? There's not always some simple thing to point to, like if you just don't do this, nothing can go wrong. Something can always go wrong. But we don't like to think that way, so we point a lot.