Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

While I was in bed, I thought about journals. I'd never kept one. I'd never given them much thought. Was there a comfort in them? There must be, or people wouldn't bother with them. Still, I wasn't sure I could imagine where such comfort would be hiding.

We deal with everything, because, short of actually deciding not to live anymore, we don't have any other option. Not one damned option.

You're saying hearts are supposed to be broken. Not sure I agree, but . . ." "Right. Otherwise you're not really using them. Which is a very cowardly way to live, don't you think?

The people with the least to give always give the most.

We couldn't do as much harm if people could feel what they were doing.

The hard work is the lion's share of the battle. Hard work can sometimes substitute for natural ability, but natural ability almost never makes up for not being willing to do the work.

You're still here," he said. He was squinting down at her. He didn't seem particularly happy, but he wasn't yelling. Nothing even close to it.

Not sure why happiness should ever seem

You worry too much. You think you have to do too much. Like you think you're always just about to make some terrible mistake. There's nothing wrong with wanting to learn to dump the tanks. There's nothing wrong with making coffee for me or walking the dog. It's nice. But I get a feeling you're doing it because you always feel like you need to do more. To be more. Like if you don't make yourself useful, you're not entitled to the air you breathe.

But if I were to simply remain within my comfort zone, clinging to the way I want to feel—unchallenged—my comfort zone would just keep getting smaller.

Paying It Forward is about spontaneously offering favors, not needing to say yes when someone asks too much of you. And also, it's about kindness rather than niceness. There's a difference. Kindness is spontaneous and real. Niceness just mostly wants to be liked.

She half stood, half floated in the water, absorbing the totality of Lance and Neal having so much shared history. So much life with each other that Roseanna knew nothing about. It felt as though someone had been watching her through one-way mirrored glass while staying safely anonymous and hidden himself. It also meant there was a great deal of her son's life that she had missed, but that much she'd known already. It just hurt to get a good look at it in retrospect.

There was something peaceful about an untouched fall of snow. Like being in another world, where nothing can go wrong. Because nothing can find you.

I am the way I am. We all are the way we are and I'm not sure any of us really knows why.

it's happy from the inside,

Because, really . . . how was she ever going to be happy if she couldn't learn to let things like that be?

anymore. Maybe he was even with someone else after all this time. "You really look worried," Pete said. "Relax. Something came up that he

the divisions of time had gone on vacation, leaving just a crush of constant moments.

Being a person is just hard." "Why doesn't anybody say so, then?" "That's a good question.

I made him my whole world. And so my world was always too small. Then when he died, I didn't know what my world was anymore. I wasn't even sure I had one.

We came to ask you a favor!" Grace made favors sound fun, like ice cream cakes, or being the one who gets to whack the piñata with the stick.

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

Why is it that years can go by, and it feels like nothing moves, and then the whole world changes three or four times in a couple of weeks?

I look back because I felt at home with May and Everett, as much as I ever have anywhere. I don't want that time to be gone. But it is gone, and even if I had not left, still it would be gone. Only for the time I was meant to be there could I feel so at peace.