Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

I'm just advising you to let go of the hate in yourself, because you're the one swallowing that poison every day, not him.

Here's what I learned from Lenny in my sophomore year of high school: the down-and-out character is just as human as everybody else. You may not want to know him in real life, but in fiction, you just might dare. And in knowing him, you get a lesson in humanity: we're more the same than we might imagine. And that even the class outcast has talents. Someone just needs to tell her what they are.

wanted to say, "Be kind to each other, and don't let anybody come between you. And if someone else does come in and break up the marriage, and there's no way around that, at least find a way to equitably share the raising of the children.

soon I stopped talking. It felt good to stop. Even though I know I said it was very important, what I was saying. But after a minute it didn't seem so important anymore, and that was a relief.

It did. Actually. Though I'm not sure that was the good news. "You don't sound too sure." "It's just that . . . what you just said . . . it's that kind of advice that lets you know what to do but not how to do it. I mean, how do you not take that stuff on?" "Right. I'll grant you that. It's easier said than done. But practice at it. You'll get better at anything you practice.

A human brain is a very odd place to have to live your life. And that's really all I have to say about that.

Raymond wondered how it would feel to live in a world where a flight of stairs stood as a massive

We both know a strange truth about the world: that people judge you by your most controversial half. If you meet a person, Raymond, who is prejudiced, this person will not think to himself, 'This Raymond has a white half, and I will respect that half of him.' People judge you only by the half they don't like. If my family had stayed in Germany, they would not have put half of me in a camp or sent half of me to the gas chamber. No. I would have been completely killed.

The first fifteen miles are the hardest, because I think I can't walk this far.

A human life is a very different place when you can tell people what you need.

People make mistakes all the time. That's more or less the definition of a person: we're a bunch of walking, talking mistake-holders. When I make a mistake, if I was doing my best, I let myself off the hook.

In his head, Stewie began a litany. Stop talking to me. Stop talking to me. Stop talking to me.

Hey, I was fifteen. Drama was my contribution to the world.

What I think I should do is more important to me than what you think

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.

Who knows why people are scared of things, right? If

War is always pointless. That's what I think.

When are you going to learn to act in your own best interests? In spite of what your emotions tell you to do?

When I write, my goal is to delve deeply enough into the human experience to find a sort of universality. Once you dig down underneath surface differences, we are all human beings. And all human beings want essentially the same things at our core. We want to love and be loved. We want to be safe. We want our loved ones to be safe.

As authors, we all have to learn not to be reactive to public statements about our books. It's really not our business what each reader thinks of them.

I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.

The world I live in is not all white people, not all straight people, and it's not all people who have their acts together, either.