Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

All the way down to my gut I got something I'd never gotten before. I got that when a person is rude and abusive to me, it's not about me at all. They can say something terrible to me or about me, but they're revealing themselves, not me. It has nothing to do with me. They're just showing me the landscape on the inside of themselves as they project it out onto somebody else. Does that make sense? It's the first time I've tried to put it into words.

I felt the kiss still there on my forehead. Literally. It was frozen there. I could still feel it. I wanted to bronze it, like people do with baby shoes. I wanted to mount it and hang it over my mantelpiece.

Tears sprang to her eyes, and she didn't know if they were for Lloyd or for Aaron. Or for herself. Or maybe tears don't have anybody's name on them. Maybe they're just tears. "That's

supermarket she tried to bite, and the dog was

We can be angels to each other. We are angels to each other, all the time. And we should be. No divine intervention required. Just a sense of staying together and looking out for each other. You know. Safety in numbers.

Our problem is not that you feel one way and I feel another. Our problem is coming to us from outside this house.

he'd be proud of me for crying, and I cry harder. How do you stop crying, Simon?

Everyone, everywhere was having a life.

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

No. He doesn't hit her. He's just so mean. I think he's really unhappy, and he just sort of always has been, and I guess for some reason he figures it's better if everybody around him is miserable, too. So he just always makes her feel bad about herself.

No," he said. "I don't think it's better for grown-ups. I think you were right the first time. Being a person is just hard." "Why doesn't anybody say so, then?" "That's

man—I think his name was Frank—hauled me out of there and asked who I belonged to, but by then I'd forgotten. By then I thought I belonged to the earth and the sky, and the sharp, pushing blades of grass that grew for me. Simon came and found me in time, and from

we weren't put here on earth to take care of each other. And that it's silly to get mad at someone for letting you down when they're just being who they are. She said it's like getting mad at your dog for not being a cat." Then

Why do we do work we hate all our lives? Somewhere earlier on the road somebody must have made us feel that we didn't have an option to do otherwise. I'm sure it gets psychologically complex

I learned a valuable lesson from that editorial experience, and it's served me well in just about every dealing I've had with editors since. If they say there's a problem, they're probably right. Believe them.

Sometimes I wonder if anything that happens to us is ever a mistake. The Zen masters say, "There is absolutely nothing wrong with this moment.

robe and opened the door.

When an eleven-year-old boy can be beaten within an inch of his life for walking down the street with the wrong friend . . . ," he said, ". . . well, I just don't see what chance we have, Lucy. We'll get somebody killed.

his shoes and ran down onto the part of the sand where it's all wet and shiny, waiting for another wave to come in. When it did, it splashed up onto

A dream has more than one owner. It belongs to everyone it may choose to touch. Whomever it concerns.

It takes a lot of energy to be that angry, and I didn't have what it took. I was beginning to feel like a big raw nerve from all these problems, compounded by lack of sleep. I needed relief. But the wind caught the letter and blew it away. Which is not to say the direction the letter took was the problem. The problem was that I thought delivering it would help to resolve things, but I was wrong.

feel that the truth is simply the truth. And that to shield someone from it is only a manner of treating that person with a lack of respect. I'm sure she didn't mean it that way, though. I'm sure she was doing what she thought best.

You can't teach somebody to do something if you don't even know how to do it yourself.

Lots of people use helping somebody to make their life feel like more.