Top 180 Kennedy Ryan Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Traditions are the memories of those before us, breathed to life when we carry them on.”

— Kennedy Ryan

52. “You can’t change what has already happened. What you did or decided. So you have two choices. Wallow in it, stay in the chokehold of guilt and shame that holds you back from the next phase of your life” – she taps the pad with the pen – “or decide you’ve punished yourself long enough for things you can never change and set a date when you’ll forgive yourself and move forward.”

— Kennedy Ryan

53. “When I thought of my husband, I didn’t dream in color, I dreamt in character.”

— Kennedy Ryan

54. “We just tiptoe around things, afraid we’ll offend or look ignorant, be misunderstood. Honesty is a risk few are willing to take.”

— Kennedy Ryan

55. “I howl like a wounded animal, but there’s no one to rescue me. I am the dumb lamb that wandered from the fold, and I’ve stumbled into the razor teeth of a hunter’s trap.”

— Kennedy Ryan

56. “Yes.” MiMi’s affirmation infuses the air with power. “Strength. Dignity. Courage. All these things belong to you. Take them back. Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.” Yours to keep and yours to share.”

— Kennedy Ryan

57. “Ours is a love that reimagines – that peels back the sky at high noon searching for the stars, collecting them like shells in a bucket. We bathe in stardust, drink from the Milky Way, and dance on the moon. We pierce the firmament, peer into infinity, and tread on time and space. There is no before. There is no after. Now gives birth to forever. This moment may die, but this love never will. Time is not a line. It’s a circle, and we, August and Iris, we stand at the center.”

— Kennedy Ryan

58. “We both gave each other space to be misunderstood, because we really wanted to understand.”

— Kennedy Ryan

59. “I’ve fallen in love with the warrior woman who walked through fire, the one who came through stronger, reshaped by sorrow, reformed by grief, reborn in joy.”

— Kennedy Ryan

60. “There’s a zone a shooter enters where the hoop feels closer and wider, like a woman spreading herself open and making it easy for you to slip in. You hear swoosh before the ball leaves your hands. It feels like you could close your eyes and make every shot – you’re that in tune with the net.”

— Kennedy Ryan

61. “It’s not an existential question of immortality, of living forever, but a challenge of numbered days and what we do with what we have. It’s not a string of todays that become yesterdays and aspire to tomorrow, but living like there is no guarantee. Living with an urgency to say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done. To no matter what, live with what you’ll leave behind in mind.”

— Kennedy Ryan

62. “I’m a mix of everything the bayou could come up with,” she continues, taking a sip of her drink. “So my cousin says I had more ingredients than – ” “Gumbo,” I finish with her. We share a smile, and she nods. “So you’re a mutt like me.”

— Kennedy Ryan

63. “Sometimes we have to fight our way out of the dark because the light doesn’t come looking.”

— Kennedy Ryan

64. “My therapist says sometimes the people who are always keeping things together are the least prepared when they actually fall apart.”

— Kennedy Ryan

65. “You signed up for me... And I signed up for you, whatever that means, wherever that takes us.”

— Kennedy Ryan

66. “There is no one else but you, my friend, my equal.” – Song of Solomon 5:2.”

— Kennedy Ryan

67. “I warned you that I’m not like other girls. I don’t have those limits. I’d do anything for you. It sounds romantic until it crosses your lines, huh? Until it goes too far.”

— Kennedy Ryan

68. “My feelings are a hot stove I want to test, even knowing the last time how it burned.”

— Kennedy Ryan

69. “Life is a constellation of decisions, connected by coincidences and deliberations, painting pictures in the heavens. During the day, when things are brightest, we don’t see the stars, but they are there. It’s only in the contrast of night, when things are darkest, that the stars shine.”

— Kennedy Ryan

70. “But religion, as it’s tossed around now, has so little compassion. So little humanity, and faith is first human.”

— Kennedy Ryan

71. “You’re a great player, August.” She tips up on her toes until her lips are at my ear. “But I think you’ll be an even greater man.”

— Kennedy Ryan

72. “I will live this day in gratitude,” I whisper, the words mingling with the smoke I scoop over my face. “Grateful to be alive and breathing and able to give and receive love. I will face every obstacle with the boldness of those who follow me, and with the courage of those who came before.”

— Kennedy Ryan

73. “Banner is completely mine and wholly her own. I love that about her.”

— Kennedy Ryan

74. “I touch my face and my fingers come away streaked with paint, smeared with pain and degradation.”

— Kennedy Ryan

75. “Can you miss someone you’ve never had? Because I miss Iris. I can’t even share that with anyone because they’d think I was a lunatic. Obsessed. Fixated. I like to think of it as certain. Like when I’m in the zone, the game comes to me easily and I’m certain I’ll make every shot before the ball even leaves my hands – that’s how I feel about Iris. She’s a shot that hasn’t even left my hands, but I know will be nothing but net. I’m certain that if ever given the chance, it would be that way for us.”

— Kennedy Ryan

76. “Do what you need to do. Change your world,” he says softly, his eyes connected to mine so intensely there’s no hope of looking away. “I have to go make my world, but when the time is right, I’ll be back for you.”

— Kennedy Ryan

77. “He runs a finger over my nose. I jerk back, startled. “You still have the freckles.” “What?” I rub my nose, wiping away his touch. “You had seven freckles on your nose then,” he says, one side of his mouth canted up. “You still do.”

— Kennedy Ryan

78. “There’s something helpless about truly being in love, the kind of love they write songs about, that inspires poetry and launches ships and wreaks havoc. It leaves you slightly off balance, controlling when you mean to cherish, smothering when you mean to hold close.”

— Kennedy Ryan

79. “Oh, I want you.” Lust roughens his voice. Love makes it soft. His gaze drops, a lazy, heated sweep over my body, a sweet searing of my skin. The look is as heavy as a stroking hand, but so gentle that I barely feel its tantalizing weight.”

— Kennedy Ryan

80. “In the end, we are just animals. Primitives driven by urges we barely understand but, with the right person, find ourselves slave to.”

— Kennedy Ryan

81. “What I’m saying is be unafraid to want it all and be disciplined enough to work hard to get it.”

— Kennedy Ryan

82. “She’s something rare – smart, classy, gorgeous, funny, opinionated, and under it all, where she tries to hide it, kind. And burrowed beneath all of that, vulnerable. She isn’t the kind of girl you mess over.”

— Kennedy Ryan

83. “Life is the grand equalizer. It has a way of stripping those privileges, rendering them inconsequential.”

— Kennedy Ryan

84. “And if you’re lucky, you find people along the way who keep your feet on the ground – who remind you that real life matters, too.”

— Kennedy Ryan

85. “History is so picked over, by the time you get to the tree, there’s barely any fruit left.”

— Kennedy Ryan

86. “Mama always reminded me that love keeps no record of wrongs. I didn’t know until now that true love, pure love, the right love, doesn’t keep that record because it can’t. I can’t. I have to forgive Rhyson because I have to be with him. I just want it to be right. I want us to be right. To.”

— Kennedy Ryan

87. “Something can feel good, but not feel right.”

— Kennedy Ryan

88. “Hope is the gap between what if and what is, but you have to fill that gap with a lot of hard work. And that’s what we’re going to talk about this week. Hope. Dreams. Work.”

— Kennedy Ryan

89. “I married a tsunami. You don’t try to control a woman like Lennix. You love her and let her wash over you.”

— Kennedy Ryan

90. “Better todays make better tomorrows, and if you don’t get tomorrow at least you had today.”

— Kennedy Ryan

91. “If you’ve heard shots as many times as we have, if you live with it, you know the sound a gun makes when it’s fired is a moan. The moan of a mother, a father, a daughter, or son losing someone they love.”

— Kennedy Ryan

92. “This is a problem since the only girl I want to sleep with won’t return my calls. Won’t leave her damn boyfriend. Won’t yield. And I’ve determined that sleeping with Banner isn’t enough. Leaving Zo isn’t enough. I want her to yield. I want her as preoccupied with me as I am with her. As fixated on me as I am on her. Anything less than her feeling as obsessed as I do just doesn’t seem fair.”

— Kennedy Ryan

93. “I guess to me, we have enough that divides us and makes us misunderstand each other. Do we really need one more thing we can’t agree on?”

— Kennedy Ryan

94. “Life is indiscriminately seasoned, usually not sweet without some bitter. Usually not sun without some rain.”

— Kennedy Ryan

95. “I like the color of smart, the shade of funny, and sexy is my favorite hue.”

— Kennedy Ryan

96. “Well, a woman in this world has to keep her wits about her and her weapons at hand.”

— Kennedy Ryan

97. “We feel the things we need to know instead of say them. With my chest pressed to his back, forgiveness, love, understanding, and tenderness transfer noiselessly between the layers of our clothes, an emotional osmosis through blood and bone, through hurt and fear.”

— Kennedy Ryan

98. “I have no pride when it comes to you, to this. I’ll chase you anywhere.”

— Kennedy Ryan

99. “What’s true today won’t be in a hundred years. In ten years. It was held as fact that the Earth was flat until it was proven otherwise. It was true that women couldn’t vote a hundred years ago. But the Earth is round and now we vote. Now we speak and are heard. We re-made truth. We re-shaped fact.”

— Kennedy Ryan

100. “MiMi says she was tutored by the bayou, by the Mississippi itself. She says that river is the blood meandering through Louisiana’s veins, and it casts a spell on all who love it.”

— Kennedy Ryan