Top 35 J. Ryan Stradal Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you see a man falling off a ladder above you, Edith believed, you don’t envision your arms breaking. You just hold them out.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

2. “God made her a giving person, and even in this house of people who could be so hateful and hard, her one skill, she knew, was to serve them and make them happy, the way even an unwatered tree still provides whatever shade it can.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

3. “Even though she had an overbite and the shakes, she was six feet tall and beautiful, and not like a statue or a perfume advertisement, but in a realistic way, like how a truck or a pizza is beautiful at the moment you want it most.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

4. “He couldn’t help it – he was in love by the time she left the kitchen – but love made him feel sad and doomed, as usual. What he didn’t know was that she’d suffered through a decade of cool, commitment-phobic men, and Lars’s kindness, but mostly his effusive, overt enthusiasm for her, was at that time exactly what she wanted in a partner.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

5. “Cynthia was so furious that evening, she opened a single-vineyard Merlot from Stag’s Leap that she’d been saving, and paired it with a bowl of macaroni and cheese from a box.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

6. “She suddenly felt sorry for these people, for perverting the food of their childhood, the food of their mothers and grandmothers, and rejecting its unconditional love in favor of what? What? Pat did not understand.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

7. “Where did you source your ingredients from?” one of them asked. “Are they local?” “Yeah,” Pat said, “they’re from the store about a mile from my house.” One of the girls behind the table laughed. “Sorry,” she said.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

8. “What people don’t understand about deer is that they’re vermin. They’re giant, furry cockroaches. They invade a space, reproduce like hell, and eat everything in sight.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

9. “Her mother had told her once that the nicest thing you can do for someone is be happy to see them, and Helen thought about that now, as she felt herself smile involuntarily.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

10. “Her grief was a forest with no trails, and she couldn’t guess how long her heart would walk through it, as her body walked other places.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

11. “Write thank-you notes,” Frank said. “Thank-you notes are the grease on society’s bearings.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

12. “Her mom carefully selected her memories to reflect her established opinions, and it turned her mind into a bowl of lettuce she believed was a salad.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

13. “She’s told me that even though you won’t meet her tonight, she’s telling you her life story through the ingredients in this meal, and although you won’t shake her hand, you’ve shared her heart. Now please, continue eating and drinking, and thank you again.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

14. “When Lars first held her, his heart melted over her like butter on warm bread, and he would never get it back. When mother and baby were asleep in the hospital room, he went out to the parking lot, sat in his Dodge Omni, and cried like a man who had never wanted anything in his life until now.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

15. “Yes, he just wanted her to want to be a mom, in the same way that he felt, with all of his blood, that he was a dad first, and everything else in the world an obscure, unfathomably distant second.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

16. “As the eastbound flight reached cruising altitude, Cindy opened the latest issue of the Economist – she saved her smarter reading for public situations – when.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

17. “It made hot girls forget you were a dork, which is the point of all music.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

18. “It occurred to Diana just then that death doesn’t happen all at once. The public death is just the beginning, and the rest takes as long as it has to, in private bits and pieces, without any warning, schedule, or validation.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

19. “And she would pray for guidance, but she wouldn’t ask the Lord forgiveness for swearing at her husband. That was gonna stand for now.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

20. “What an honor to live in a part of the world that loves good old-fashioned baking.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

21. “After decades away from the Midwest, she’d forgotten that bewildering generosity was a common regional tic.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

22. “Don’t let it go to your head,” their mother said. “The more you blow into your balloon, the easier it’s popped.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

23. “Ned had no clue how any parent could live a life without regret. Like most parents, he just had to choose which regrets he could live with.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

24. “Why’d you have to go and say that?” Shotty asked. “Now I might look forward to seeing you.” At the time she just thought it was a clever comeback from a clever old man, but on her drive home, she heard the sadness in it, the sadness of a world where the people who cared for him were swapped out like baseball cards, the peril of attachment in a world of dependence, and the fatigue of anticipation, anywhere.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

25. “She was petite back then, and wasn’t anymore, but her power was that she’d always acted like she had the exact body she was supposed to have, at every age, like most men did.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

26. “He was a tad less pleasant than most of the other residents, but God likes all kinds, and Edith sure tried to as well.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

27. “One of the things that Eva hated the most about being a kid was how everyone always told her that childhood was the best time of their entire lives, and don’t grow up too fast, and enjoy these carefree days while you can. In those moments, her body felt like the world’s smallest prison, and she escaped in her mind to her chile plants, resting on rock wool substrate under a grow light in a bedroom closet, as much a prisoner of USDA hardiness zone 5b as she was.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

28. “She’d heard enough regrets in her lifetime to know that dreams don’t always die because of something terrible, but more often because of something that’s merely acceptable.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

29. “You said that she works, though.” “Yeah, at Arby’s and Kohl’s.” “Two jobs. That’s a decent living, isn’t it?” They passed a sign for the golf course, getting closer to Frank’s street. “I can see how it would comfort you to believe that.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

30. “People here liked to say they rooted for the underdog, but some of them got real quiet when the underdog was different from them.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

31. “It all looks the same in the toilet the next morning...”

— J. Ryan Stradal

32. “It reminded him of college life, how you could see most of someone’s possessions all at once in a single room, defiantly asserting a personality.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

33. “With a dog, it’s almost like having a kid.” “No, it’s not like having a kid,” she said. “It’s preferable in every possible way. That makes it like having a dog.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

34. “That day, and for a long time after, she’d grapple with God’s injustice too, but it was also a long time before she learned that God needed an indestructible person for the tasks that lay ahead, and this is how they’re forged.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

35. “Braque was used to this kind of crap; her mom had been a master choreographer of anxious micromanagement since Braque could remember.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

36. “What he would tell her instead, he hadn’t yet decided, but now was not the time to think about such things. Now was the time to sit with his little family of two people, and cry.”

— J. Ryan Stradal

37. “Did she really have to wait out seven more soul-shredding years? It was like being told you can run free one day – in June several years from now – but during every second of the intervening time, you’ll be getting run over by the world’s slowest steamroller, and every day it cracks a bone, and recracks it, and recracks it, and when you’re eighteen all you’re going to have is a body full of dust, lifted and carried into the future like a flag loose from its mast.”

— J. Ryan Stradal