Top 150 Catherine Ryan Hyde Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “But when nobody punishes you, you have to do it yourself, and there’s no release date on that. We’re always harder on ourselves than any governing body could ever get away with being.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

52. “We just made the mistake of putting it off. We thought we would lose nothing by putting it off. We thought we had plenty of time. I guess that was our key mistake, right? We thought there would always be more time. Why do we do that? I mean, not just Luis and me. Everybody. Why does everybody do that? Think we’ll have more time?”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

53. “It makes no difference whether you believe all this or you don’t. It not only makes no difference to me, but to anything. Things don’t wait for you to believe them. They happen. God is not Tinkerbell. He does what he does whether you clap your hands or hide behind the comfort of your disbelief.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

54. “That’s how most of the last fifty years of my life disappeared, even though I didn’t know it before now. And believe me, that’s all it takes. One little kiss and then you’ve thrown your lot in with someone, and your whole life has to be built around him. And all the parts of you that don’t fit with him have to go into hiding, and all the ones that do have to come to the surface and act like they’re the whole of you. The.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

55. “We’re all just doing our best.’ I left out the second part. ‘Even if it doesn’t look so good from the outside.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

56. “I just think it’s odd how we parse out our empathy,” he said. “Why we only have empathy for those who remind us most of ourselves. I’m not saying I don’t understand it. Sure, it’s easy to have empathy for someone who’s just like us. It comes naturally. I just think it’s a shame we can’t take it a bit further. I can’t help wondering what the world would be like if our empathy muscle were a bit more developed.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

57. “I suppose we’re built with complete free will, and as much as we’re capable of depravity, to the same degree we are wired for greatness. Everyone gets to choose, I think. And my challenge is to decide where I’ll place the bulk of my attention. What I’ll most believe in.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

58. “You can’t tell someone to pursue their dream only if it’s a good match for your own. You can’t dictate what dream he should pursue.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

59. “I can live through everything or I can answer for everything, but sometimes both is just too much for one day.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

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

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

61. “She was looking at her life. It was the same array of property and belongings she looked at every day. Except you don’t look at your life every day. You don’t stand a step or two outside it and say to yourself, This is my life. You just walk through it the way she assumed a fish swims through water, never registering it as water. It’s just what is.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

62. “And here is the thing about experiences that wake you up, Raymond: You try to get back to sleep, but it’s easier said than done. Once you’re awake, you’re awake. Good luck hitting the snooze button, my friend.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

63. “It flitted through her mind without actual words that skin is an odd thing for the world to make a fuss about, especially when, with your eyes closed, it all feels more or less the same.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

64. “I just feel like it’s our job to take care of them. You know? And when you take care of someone, you should love them the way they are. Not try to make them different.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

65. “The world will still be a place where people do terrible things. But here’s the thing about despair. We fall into despair when the terrible gangs up on us and we forget the world can also be wonderful. We just see terrible everywhere we look. So what you do for your friend is you bring up the wonderful, so both are side by side. The world is terrible and wonderful at the same time. One doesn’t negate the other, but the wonderful keeps us in the game. It keeps us moving forward.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

66. “Maybe the school was the problem, August thought. Maybe everybody wants a science lesson if they’re sitting in the middle of one of the greatest geothermal wonders of the world. Maybe we’ve removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

67. “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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

68. “In certain moments I suspect life knows exactly what it’s doing.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

69. “I don’t mean that I remember hearing about it. I remember the caul, and then the sudden absence of it.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

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

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

71. “But upset is a funny thing. It looks for places to direct itself. It’s an emotion given to action, and it needs somewhere to go. Even if it has to make something up as it goes along.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

72. “Everything grows best in oxygen and sunlight except secrets and guilt and regrets. They like the dank spaces. Drag them out into the light and they fail to thrive.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

73. “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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

74. “Not a bad life’s work.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

75. “The drinks were so perfect, so visually artistic. Virginia could honestly believe she would find her salvation in one.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

76. “What does it mean when someone loses the use of most of his brain, and it makes him more kind?”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

77. “Why be given hours and days if all you want to do is make them go away again?”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

78. “A kiss, she thinks, has to be entirely balanced – it has to have a little conflict, a little dialectic, a little revolution.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

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

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

80. “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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

81. “They had shopping carts full of food and toys, but they looked bored and unhappy. How could a person go to the store, buy everything she needed – and wanted, from the look of some of those carts – and still seem dissatisfied? What more did they need to be happy, then? If all this wouldn’t do it?”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

82. “What’s weird is when you mean a lot more to somebody else than they ever meant to you. I mean, a whole lot more. Like life on two whole different planets.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

83. “Jody picked his way downhill along Highway 22, Worthy trotting along beside him on an improvised rope leash. Jody didn’t like the rope. It looked shabby, and the last thing he wanted was to mark the dog’s value that way.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

84. “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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

85. “We always say we’ll never get used to change, but then the change happens and we do.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

86. “But we waste our precious time. Why? Why do we live like we’re not going to die?”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

87. “Almost everything is easier to get into than it is to get out of.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

88. “Accepting things. That’s what the talk was about. About how insane it is to try to pretend something isn’t a certain way, or that you can make it another way, just because you don’t like it.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

89. “If there’s one thing I learned growing up, it’s that you have to talk to kids a lot, and you have to tell them the damn truth.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

90. “Every now and then my love for that child hit me so hard I felt bowled over. Like a turtle knocked upside down onto its shell, unable to right itself. This was one of those moments.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

91. “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?”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

92. “It’s a good summer. A full one. With lots of good firsts. Which is good. Since it’s the last.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

93. “I’ve practiced “alone” a lot, and I’m good at it.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

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

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

95. “I no longer think I lack judgment about men. I will never again say my instincts are poor, no sir, because how do I keep finding this same guy over and over? I am beginning to think I have a very keen sense of judgment, only it would seem that it is on somebody else’s side.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

96. “Addict logic,” Yolanda said, not missing a beat. “Life viewed through resentment.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

97. “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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

98. “I realized I’d been on pins and needles waiting to see how he’d react to being penned up again. I’ll never understand that. How can I be on pins and needles and not even know it? It sounds like a thing that shouldn’t exist in the world at all, but there it is. It’s discouraging to be in the middle of a life that’s impossible to explain.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

99. “You could do worse than to be amazed.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

100. “We’re all just running around being exactly what we are.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde