Top 180 Kennedy Ryan Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “Are you looking at my butt?” I ask, waffling between flattered and offended. “Of course,” Jared replies as if I’m crazy for asking. “I actually wish you’d stop talking because I was literally committing your ass in those pants to memory, and you’re breaking my concentration.”

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Traditions are the memories of those before us, breathed to life when we carry them on.”

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

60. “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

61. “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

62. “I will worship you,” I remind her, taking her hand and tracing the letters tattooed beneath her wedding band, linking our fingers, showing her the ink beneath mine. “Still?” she asks with a watery smile. “Yeah.” Always. Evermore. Even after. “Still.”

— Kennedy Ryan

63. “As much as she lights up a room, dancing, laughing from time to time, I’m beginning to see that just beneath the surface of Kai, there is as much shadow as there is shine.”

— Kennedy Ryan

64. “You want me to relieve you of the responsibility? ‘Cause I’ll do it. I don’t mind being the villain, but between you and me, we’ll know that you want it as badly as I do. I’m just the one with the balls to make it happen.”

— Kennedy Ryan

65. “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

66. “And it still isn’t enough. Anything that ended would never be enough for a love like ours. A love like ours is only satisfied by forever.”

— Kennedy Ryan

67. “If you were mine, Iris there would be no doubt what position you’d hold in my life. You’d be center. I’d play you at the five.”

— Kennedy Ryan

68. “Every day that ends with me still breathing has ended well.”

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

70. “He studies me a moment longer, and the intimacy and openness are almost too much, but I force myself not to look away. I’ve never been more vulnerable to anyone, and I’ve never trusted anyone else the way I trust Grip – with my life, with my heart.”

— Kennedy Ryan

71. “Probably for the rest of my life, a part of me would always hurt wondering if I could have had you.”

— Kennedy Ryan

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “We are artists,” she quotes softly, her eyes set on mine. “When there is no joy to be found, we have the power in our hands, the will of our souls, to make it.”

— Kennedy Ryan

76. “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

77. “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

78. “You have no idea what I’d do for you if you’d let me.” He runs his thumb over my bottom lip., his touch light, but enough to seize my breath. Enough to triple my heartbeat. “But one day you will.”

— Kennedy Ryan

79. “Iris said they come from a long line of voodoo high priestesses. I see it in Lotus. A regalness – a mystery and an aura, like she knows your thoughts before you think them and is fully capable of changing your mind.”

— Kennedy Ryan

80. “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

81. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

83. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

86. “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

87. “And I think I’m most grateful for time, which doesn’t always heal all wounds, but teaches us how to be happy again even with our scars.”

— Kennedy Ryan

88. “It begins with a tremor, a realization that love happens in the fragile context of our mortality. That love and life occur just beyond the reach of our control. There is only one letter of difference between love and lose, and somewhere along the way, for me they became synonymous. I understand now that something broke in me after my parents died that somehow healed wrong, and I started measuring how much I loved people in terms of how much it would hurt to lose them.”

— Kennedy Ryan

89. “Do not live someone else’s life and someone else’s idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you.” -Viola Davis, Oscar-Winning Actress.”

— Kennedy Ryan

90. “Question is, how did you live? Did you live or just wait for death to come? Not me. I ain’t waiting for nothing.”

— Kennedy Ryan

91. “Grief is a grind. It is the work of breathing and waking and rising and moving through a world that feels emptier. A gaping hole has been torn into your existence, and everyone around you just walks right past it like it’s not even there. But all you can do is stand and stare.”

— Kennedy Ryan

92. “We splinter into a thousand pieces in her kitchen, becoming more together than we were apart. More than we were alone. With whispered promises and words of love, we exchange hearts.”

— Kennedy Ryan

93. “I will kiss him a million times in our life together and never tire of it. My lips will always cling, curious and searching. His touch is an endless thrill.”

— Kennedy Ryan

94. “Don’t just act out of what you think is best for her. You’re not her parent. You’re not her father. Think about what will show her that you love her and understand her.”

— Kennedy Ryan

95. “Give yourself permission to let it hurt, but allow yourself permission to let it heal.” Nikki Rowe, Once a Girl, Now a Woman.”

— Kennedy Ryan

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

100. “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