Top 150 Catherine Ryan Hyde Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It’s one thing to know the right path and another thing to take it.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

102. “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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

103. “A tightening in her chest almost stopped her. It was a foreign feeling, to be so afraid of words addressed to her own son. And, in another very real way, familiar. She had stood at this threshold many times, and each time she had let that clench of fear stop her.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

104. “People learned by what they experienced. It mattered little what anyone said to anyone.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

105. “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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

106. “Don’t you wonder sometimes why so much gets heaped on certain people?” I almost told the truth. That truth being, “I wouldn’t dare.” I wouldn’t dare dwell on a thing like that. I try to look forward in my life. Because what’s behind me is a little hard to take.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

107. “My threshold for human contact had worn painfully thin. I felt like a car that had been running its lights too long on battery alone. I felt fresh out of charge, and as though I needed to plug in for days before I could have one more conversation with one more human being.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

108. “That’s all addiction really is. It’s trading away the future so you can feel OK right now.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

109. “You think you’ll get over the loss of someone. Eventually. Because it seems we get over everything, given enough time. And I guess in a lot of ways I’ve partially gotten over the traumatic event of her passing. But what you don’t realize, until you have to live it, is that it’s the absence of the person that’s the trouble. The ongoing absence. And 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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

110. “Thank you. I’m honored. Most people pay very little attention. People are funny, don’t you think? I used to play for the philharmonic, and people would pay good money for those tickets. Big money. But I sit out here and play the same music, and most people won’t even flip me a quarter as they walk by. Same music. Just a different sense of how much they should value it.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

111. “They just want to kill the pain. Everybody just wants to kill the pain.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

112. “Her body felt like a giant bag of lack. Lack of motivation. Lack of strength. Lack of rigidity. Lack of caring.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

113. “Of course it landed in my gut to a total panic response, because I wasn’t expecting anyone, and didn’t seem able to anticipate anything but more trouble. I try not to think that way, but it’s more a feeling than a thought, and besides, it’s an involuntary response.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

114. “But sometimes the hard parts of our lives come with something valuable attached.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

115. “You can only wrestle with something for just so long. Then you have to break in one direction or another. Just to end the wrestling. Something has to give.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

116. “Some things, like innocence, only go one way.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

117. “Situations are like that. They take up all the time you used to use for working and eating and sleeping. They soak up your whole life like a black hole in space soaks up the sunlight. And then, where you used to have a life, all you have left is a situation.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

118. “Well, you’re seeing what ain’t there.” Or what you wanted for yourself and never got. What we don’t get, we see everywhere we look. What we won’t let ourselves do, be, we refuse to tolerate in any other living soul. Arlene was beginning to notice this.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

119. “Everything grows best in oxygen and sunlight except secrets and guilt and regrets. They.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

120. “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?”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

121. “But I bet more than half the people in the world right now are worrying about something that really is going to be okay.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

122. “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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

123. “I loved pain, followed it, thought it would cleanse me, right my wrongs.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

124. “The value of your life is your own choosing,” Nathan said.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

125. “That’s the lovely thing about having an animal. You might not want to get up for your own sake, but you will bring yourself to do it for them.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

126. “They reminded her what it meant to allow someone into your life. You see something you like in a man, so you ask him in, but what comes in is all of him. Not only the parts you took a liking to, but the many parts that don’t fit with you at all. That’s always the way it worked.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

127. “Not a one of us can be everything somebody else wants us to be. Trouble comes when we try to pretend we can. Or when people see it like a betrayal. You know. That somebody won’t meet all their needs. My mom used to say it’s because we weren’t put here on earth to take care of each other. And that it’s silly to get mad at someone for letting you down when they’re just being who they are. She said it’s like getting mad at your dog for not being a cat.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

128. “That’s the thing about days. No matter what your opinion of days, they always go by.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

129. “And you never have to change the water, because the horse does it for you, by drinking it down and triggering the valve to refill. So there’s always fresh oxygen for the fish. And you never have to feed the fish, because they eat the algae. And so long as no hawks or eagles come by to go fishing, you’re golden.” “And they don’t scare the horse?” “Never met a horse who cared.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

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

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

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

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

132. “So I guess the theme of this novel is, “Look for strength in unexpected places.” Not only might you find it there, but it might be more beautiful and more hopeful than strength found anywhere else. Here’s to strength and healing.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

133. “You can put any kind of judgment you want on the way you feel, but that won’t make it go away. Unfortunately you can’t insult your feelings out of existence. Trust me. People try all the time. If it worked, we’d know about it by now.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

134. “Once you get that sense that there’s no real security, that anything at all can happen to you, then every minute you’re okay is a joy. Part of the joy is feeling like you can make your way in a world that isn’t always easy.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

135. “But you have to let people go through whatever it is they have to go through. Just be there for your friends. That’s all we can really do for each other sometimes.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

136. “You can be just a regular, real person and still be the magic somebody else needs in her life. We do it for each other all the time. It’s that everyday sort of magic. We’re all capable of it, I do believe, but still you don’t always see people living up to that potential.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

137. “So many times in life we think we see what we want. That we know what we want. Looking back through the wrong end of that scope, I sometimes wonder why we still believe we know anything at all.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

138. “There is one thing in this life you can never hide, and that’s love. When you’re in love, you can’t disguise that. No one I’ve known can conceal it, so far as I could tell. It’s like that old saying about trying to hide your light under a bushel basket, except in this case all that happens is you get this very shiny basket that glows with a light people can see from miles away.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

139. “Maybe you hate a thing more than anything. But it’s what is. To accept it means to see that it is that way, and that it won’t be another way no matter how much you hate it.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

140. “He had still offered me no return address. I couldn’t have written back and given him my reaction to his words, even if I had known what to say.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

141. “I don’t think you feel much of anything anymore.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

142. “There is no boogeyman. Just a bunch of flawed humans, some more flawed than others, but more or less cut from the same human mold.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

143. “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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

144. “The reason people are unhappy is because they’re so sure they know what they want. And then it makes them unhappy when they don’t get it. I personally think people would be happier if they weren’t so sure they knew the difference between a good thing and a bad thing.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

145. “We all have to go from not knowing to knowing. If you have shortcomings, I fully believe it’s better to look them in the eye. Pretending otherwise gets you nowhere.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

146. “Life gives us nothing outright. It only lends. Nothing is ours to keep. Absolutely nothing. Not even our bodies, our brains. This ‘self’ that we think we know so well, that we think of as us. It is only on loan. If a person comes into our life, they will go again. In a parting of ways, or because everyone dies. They will die or you will die. Nothing we receive in this life are we.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

147. “Yeah. That’s the problem with trials. Somehow they have it in their heads, the judge and jury, that they’ll decide what’s the truth. But the truth already happened. They can’t decide what happened. They can only be right or wrong about it. Seems like too many times they’re wrong.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

148. “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.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

149. “But I think it might be fair to say that all the reasons intersect and have one thing in common: too many people can’t believe they deserve someone wonderful.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde

150. “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. And, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Raymond, but that’s as good as the world is going to get.”

— Catherine Ryan Hyde