Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

tea. "I think very often in life we do something important for someone else for no better reason than that they need us to. And really, when you think about it . . . what more reason is needed?

One, not to look up and see how far I still have to climb. Instead to look back and see how far I've climbed already. When I see what I just did, I know I can do what comes next. Given time. And, two, to give myself time.

You have the memories, and you go over and over them in your mind. And after a time I wonder if I am remembering the actual event or just remembering the memories.

Drag them out into the light and they fail to thrive.

I think it makes not one bit of difference if those words came from the soul of Annaliese Schmidt or from the inside of my own brain.

She was also close to the other side. Maybe even close enough to see things most people can't.

Maybe everything deteriorates in time, and maybe that doesn't make it any less worth having while it lasts.

I think it makes not one bit of difference if those words came from the soul of Annaliese Schmidt or from the inside of my own brain. I think it only matters if the words are right.

He was different. He didn't waste his time with crap like that. He had living to do. He knew who he was and he didn't have anything to prove to anybody. He had no problem saying he made a mistake, or he didn't know. That's a sign of confidence in a person. People think it's the other way around. But it's only people who don't have their acts together who work so hard to make you think they do.

They are white, and there is much privilege that comes with being so, but they don't see it, because there's never been a day in their life when it wasn't there. So you ask them if ethnicity makes a difference to them, and they say no. And in many cases they think they are telling the truth. It

More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

I watched webs of lightning crackle in the dark air, framed by their black-cloud background, touching down on the rim forty or fifty miles to the east. Then, just as quickly as it had come, it blew through again.

this was his single greatest quality: he made everybody feel dear. And the sad truth of this world is that not many people feel that way, and not much of the time.

How can it be good to know nothing?" "It's not. But if you know nothing, it's good to know that you know nothing." "Oh," Grace said. "Yeah, I guess." "Because as long as you think you know everything, nothing changes.

Then he said, "I just sort of finally got used to the idea that you didn't like me much." "No, I do. It just takes me a long time, sometimes. To figure out how I feel about something.

It was after two in the morning, I would later learn, and I was having a dream that was nothing but hoofbeats. No visuals at all. Just a gray screen of nothingness, and the sound of hoofbeats.

You're selling your moose?" "I'm selling all of them.

I watched her back and thought, Is that how you make a friend? They just sort of come up and attach themselves to you, and then there you are? It had been so long since I'd made a new friend, I really didn't remember.

Like 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.

Sometimes people are scared of a thing that won't hurt them. But they're not scared for no reason.

Accepting things. That's what the talk was about. About how insane it is to try to pretend something isn't a certain way, or that you can make it another way, just because you don't like it. And how that seems to be the one thing that makes addicts use drugs, and pretty much ruins everybody's lives. This thing about refusing to just accept the way things are when you can't change them anyway.

People need help with perspective sometimes. If they're all alone in their own head, they can lose perspective.

Sometimes we think we know what to fear. We never turn our back on it. Then something else we never thought of comes along. I wonder if what finally caught her in the end was something she feared all that time, or something she never would have thought of.

I never know what to make of relationships. Part of me feels like they're not right, but then another part of me doesn't know how right it's reasonable to expect them to be.