Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

I mean . . . you just make the best of happy while you've got it, right?

What a man eats, he should be willing to kill.

And I think to myself, If you think having and losing is so bad, try never having. Now that's devastating.

So you're saying you don't feed something in a situation where it would be a big disaster for it to grow.

Anything that lifts responsibility for our actions is addictive, I've found. So

So maybe you're sitting here thinking, I have a right to fire my gun if I think I'm in danger. But does your neighbor have a right to fire his gun at you if he thinks you're a danger to him?

My father taught me not to look down on nobody, not to think bad about nobody. Except assholes. He said it's OK to be prejudiced against assholes, because nobody has to be an asshole. It's voluntary.

By the time I'd managed to pull up to the curb, my heart was pounding so hard I thought it might burst free. And not in a good way. I couldn't breathe, which didn't help. And I thought, Why doesn't love feel good? Why does it make you feel like you're about to die?

Those who haven't been in school for years may have forgotten the piercing and utter humiliation of almost anything your mother does there. Even if it's marginally acceptable by adult standards. I haven't been in school for years. University and graduate school not counting. And yet I remember.

When he woke in the morning, his father still had not come back. That was when Remy fully came to understand fear. He thought he had felt it all along. But in that fulcrum of a moment, he realized he had only understood a sort of miniature fear, like fear's little brother.

higher and kicked him.

In the realm of wounded humans, you're never going to have it all. Also, I should note that in my opinion, we're all wounded humans. The rest is just a matter of degree.

That's the thing about this other side we're on. There is no landscape. If you want to see things in any kind of context, you have to pick a context. You have to take one from home.

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

Once you throw down that gauntlet of ultimatum, the "one more thing" will happen. Nat figured it probably wouldn't even matter much what it was. It would be the straw that broke her. And it had been defined. Prepared for. So it would happen. It was only a matter of time.

when you're missing someone, a longer time without them doesn't solve the problem. The longer you don't see someone, the more you miss them." He

I said, "You know, Pat, you're more like my mother than my mother is." She said, "Well, it works like that sometimes. Blood family, that's something we get dealt. Sometimes we get a bad hand. Not much way around it. You just have to grow up and get more family. The kind you get to pick out yourself.

Why not make it into something better?" "Because it's enough.

You're not using your head, dear," she says. "No, of course I'm not," he says. "I'm using my heart.

nobody does anything wrong until the moment they do.

I decided I would be strong, not because I had to be, not because they had used up all the weakness, but because strong was what I wanted for myself.

I was a mean old woman. I'd never meant to be, but it was unquestionable that I was. Up until that moment, I'd half known, but I hadn't cared what other people thought of me. I guess I cared what Vern thought, but somehow I'd considered him grandfathered in. I guess I'd thought he had to put up with me regardless. I cared what Denny and Bobby thought of me,

As long as I live, I'm never going to do what they're doing. I made myself a promise. And now I'm making the promise to you. I'm never going to judge somebody I don't know. And if somebody is accused of something in the newspaper or on TV, I'm going to remember that maybe he did it or maybe he didn't. I wasn't there, so I don't know.

I have trouble with people like that. Like that woman who was just here. They come up to you in a time of grief, and they can't seem to accept that it's grief. They can't just be in that moment of grief with you. They can't just say, 'Yeah, this is some pretty awful stuff.' They have to try to fix it. They have to solve it for you in a couple of sentences, which is ridiculous,