Quotes from Catherine Ryan Hyde

There are some things it doesn't feel good to do, but there shouldn't be things you can't do. It gives the world too much power over you.

But we waste our precious time. Why? Why do we live like we're not going to die?

Because it's everything a person needs to live a decent life. It has a stove for heat. A fridge to keep your food cold and a stove to cook it when you're ready to eat it. It has a bathtub and a shower to get you clean after your chores and a bed to lie down in at the end of the day. And that's all a person really needs. And I think the whole trouble with us is that we think we need so much more.

And the best way to make someone unhappy, if not downright unbalanced, is to tell her that what she sees with her own eyes is not there at all.

But you can't change the world on the honor system. Shoot, anybody knows that. Leave people on the honor system, they don't do it. As soon as you look away, they just don't. I mean, look what happened.

The moon shows it all. Thank god the moon is on my side. I'll need a piece of that, a piece of Sarah, all of myself and all of Simon.

Not a bad life's work.

Everybody is a good person and a bad person at the same time. The only real variation is in the balance

trying to model what it means to be a man, but they don't truly know. They think it means be tough, feel nothing, betray nothing. And then Luis comes along and decides that his definition of a man is someone who is not afraid to be kind. That takes courage. Don't you think?

It's a good summer. A full one. With lots of good firsts. Which is good. Since it's the last.

People come into our lives, she thought, and it's not always a forever kind of thing, and not always meant to be. Not every deal is for keeps.

I wonder sometimes why we're all so afraid of one another. Or... actually... no, I don't really wonder. I know why. But I reflect on it. And I think it's a shame.

You don't fall down to love, you climb up to it. There's hard work involved. That's why I believe you can't love someone you don't know. Loving someone is knowing them.

Never be afraid to look, Raymond. It's always better to look. Whatever you're afraid of, turn toward it, not away. Once you're willing to do that, it loses all its power over you.

watching TV and playing solitaire is not a proper life. It's not living. It's killing time, and that's hardly the same. You start asking yourself too many questions when your day is reduced to these rote activities that accomplish nothing. You start to wonder

if you meet someone you don't like, or who doesn't treat you right, try to reserve judgment, because you don't know what that person's going through,

world is terrible and wonderful at the same time.

But the problem was, I tried to get him to do things that would be the right things for me to do. But I don't think they were the right things for him. I was trying to help him the way I thought he should be helped, but he's not me.

In the beginnings of that silence, he knew something. Clearly. 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.

Like I told you before, it gets to be an addiction. 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.

Nothing's more dangerous than a girl,

I think about the time Mitch asked me why I was such a happy little guy. I was five years old. Pearl had been gone a few weeks. I thought really hard for an answer even though I think he'd gone about his business without expecting one. Then I said, "I think it's because my mother loves me so much." He gave me this look of utter pity, like I was the bravest kid in the world. He missed the point completely, you know?

On the way up the walk I took in the weedless border gardens, the two floors of smudgeless windows, and I wondered, when a person does all this, do they have time left over for other things?

It depends how important it is to them to see things differently.