Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

He never liked the way he felt after eating a meal that was almost all carbs and almost no protein.

I'd been focusing strongly on green since my days in pasture seeing through the eyes of a horse.

I am not as unstable as people tend to think, but I allow them their margin for error because it allows me mine.

Living long is a gift denied to many, and so it comes with a responsibility to make the most of it.

truth is simply the truth. And perhaps does not exist for us to bend and revise. Or even filter

I wondered if my life would have turned out all differently if my hair had been blonde and baby-fine. If I'd been naturally pretty and tall like the ladies across the road.

My brain was not right. I told it to perform, and it wouldn't listen. Then, suddenly, just as I gave up on remembering, it was there. Fully formed in my brain.

Well, you know how it is. We either grow up to be our mother or we make a solemn vow to the universe to be her polar opposite. Doesn't work every minute of every day, though.

the truth is simply the truth. And perhaps does not exist for us to bend and revise. Or even filter to suit the feelings of those we love and want to protect.

Maybe when you put tears away uncried, everything you cry about from that day on contains a little of those tears.

in a corral with the horses. They accepted me immediately. Unlike people, they don't judge much by your outsides. They knew I was one of them. Problem was, when one of the employees came around to ask what I was doing there, I was pretty caught up in being a horse, and I spooked. I felt my eyes widen, showing white all the way around,

No. It's not your job to convince him. It's his job to believe it. This is his shortcoming, not yours. He needs to think well enough of himself to believe it. And that's always been a problem for him.

The point is that it's you being destroyed by your hate. Not him. This is what the Buddha called picking up a hot coal to hurl at your enemy.

I didn't want to pry. I felt like one of those typical white boys who didn't understand a thing. Who didn't even know, until a Japanese boy told me, that his family was not allowed citizenship. Maybe he wouldn't have minded my trying to learn. But I felt intimidated by my own ignorance, sure that every word out of my mouth would be a mistake.

You think passion is enough. That it's all you really need. You think if something's just really, really important to you, it'll magically appear. Well, passion is all well and good. You won't get nowhere without it. But it's not the whole enchilada. You still gotta go step-by-step like everybody else.

There's no beginning, middle and end to that experience. The split second it happens, it's happened. In its entirety. The only time that really elapses is the time it takes you to catch up. To absorb what just happened to you. And nobody ever thinks it's going to unhappen. Do they?

What a man eats, he should be willing to kill. It's not absolutely necessary that he do so, but he should at least be willing to face the reality of it. To eat a chicken only if it comes from the market is the height of cowardice and denial. Someone still had to kill it.

Addict logic," Yolanda said, not missing a beat. "Life viewed through resentment.

This idea opened a door to my seeing that the rigors and trials of a task that big are not brick walls designed to keep me out. They're just pop quizzes to determine how badly I want in.

I don't mean that I remember hearing about it. I remember the caul, and then the sudden absence of it.

We're all just running around being exactly what we are.

And that, I now realize, is how you start the pattern of silences. So innocently and on such a small scale, and then once you open the door for them, they barge in and take on a life of their own.

It's a choice between getting the crap beaten out of you for being exactly what you are, or avoiding the beating by selling out and pretending you're not, which is like pretending there's something wrong with what you are. I'm not sure which is worse.

When somebody holds a view that seems to make no sense, know that it makes sense to them, but for reasons you don't know anything about yet. And I guess in a lot of cases, you never will.