Top 180 Kennedy Ryan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I heard someone say once that when you try to fix people’s hurt, you’re controlling it instead of sitting with them and connecting.”

— Kennedy Ryan

52. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “Then you have some tough decisions to make, and you should make them soon.” He bends to drop a soft kiss on my nose. “Because I won’t give up until you’re completely mine, Banner, and I won’t wait much longer.”

— Kennedy Ryan

59. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

64. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

66. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “No one has to tell a queen to wear her crown.”

— Kennedy Ryan

72. “But you have one more time to put your finger in my face and step to me.”

— Kennedy Ryan

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

87. “She’s right. I’m dirty. How could I not be after that animal was inside me? After he subdued me like a rabbit he only left alive for sport?”

— Kennedy Ryan

88. “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

89. “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

90. “Take them back. Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.”

— Kennedy Ryan

91. “Love is as strong as death.”

— Kennedy Ryan

92. “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

93. “Rhyson’s words set my heart free like a stampede of wild notes across a music staff, falling off the lines, running off the page. I’m a composition out of control, without form. Freestyled. Improvised.”

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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