Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

I see the sun, high overhead, and then I know. This darkness doesn't belong to the night. It belongs to me.

You can be just a regular, real person and still be the magic somebody else needs in her life. We do it for each other all the time. It's that everyday sort of magic. We're all capable of it, I do believe, but still you don't always see people living up to that potential.

He feels a seizing in his chest, a familiar searing pain. He tries to breathe around it, but it's too big. It radiates along his left arm, folds him in half, like he's a piece of trash too big for disposal.

I didn't know if I had saved a life or not. For that, the person you tried to save has to survive.

There's more to bagging groceries than you think. It's not as easy as it looks. There's a lot to know.

It had been fun, yes, and had provided a fleeting sense of happiness. Like a miniature vacation from the sorrow.

That's the thing about mothers. If you're close, you don't want to lose that closeness, though I don't know from personal experience. If you're not, you harbor this little thread of hope that you will be someday, and you don't want to be told you've just run out of time.

Sometimes people are scared of a thing that won't hurt them. But they're not scared for no reason. They're just not scared for the reason they think they are. Like when I was a kid. I liked to watch scary movies, so then I could be scared and tell myself it was about the werewolf or the vampire. But I was already scared. I was just looking for something to feel it about.

The core idea is that a thing is not a thing until it has an observer. And the observer seems to play a role in what kind of thing it will snap into being. But beyond that—no need to be so esoteric.

Dear, dear Ruthie," he said, and grasped one of my hands in both of his. And although it was an oversimplification of the man, it struck me that 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.

Really? Are you sure?" "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.

Maybe because if we cared that much about everything, all the time, all at the same time like that, we'd die of exhaustion. We'd have no time or energy left to run our own lives.

She glanced over her shoulder at the dog, who was still leaning nervously against the door. She shot him a look that said he was entirely to blame for all of this. He returned a look that said he accepted all that guilt and more.

Yozzy is a horse, for which I envy her.

But it made him feel ashamed to say it, because it wasn't entirely true. He felt it shouldn't have mattered. But it did. He had wanted everyone to see his talented hen. He had wanted to fill to bursting with pride while everyone watched.

Seems all my life I had to make choices between what I considered wasting money and what I now see was wasting my life. If it keeps you from wasting your life, it can't very well be a waste, now can it?

What I'm saying," he said, rising to a bit more anger now, his cheeks flushing slightly, "is that I'd like to know what good my life is to me." "The value of your life is your own choosing," Nathan said.

It may surprise you to hear that good coffee made in shabby locations still tastes like good coffee.

Sometimes we have to own our decisions. Good or bad." "Right," Allie said. "I'm getting that. I thought I got that all along, my whole life. But it turns out I just

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?

If a person comes into our life, they will go again. In a parting of ways, or because everyone dies. They will die or you will die. Nothing we receive in this life are we allowed to keep.

But mostly I just kept reminding myself to burn every moment into my memory. I just tried to be sure I was always there. That I didn't miss anything.

Wondering why life was always a process of choosing the lesser of two evils. Why couldn't a person have all of what they'd been wanting?

You can't change anybody's mind. No matter what you say to them. The sooner you figure that out, the happier your life will be.