Top 180 Kennedy Ryan Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “However imperfect she appears to some, she is ours, and we already love her deeply and will treasure any time we have with her.”

— Kennedy Ryan

107. “What if she gave me to you?” I bend to whisper over her lips. “What if I’m your gris gris now?”

— Kennedy Ryan

108. “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. Unsure of where we’re going, but certain that it’s right. Sure that in the end, it will be a thing of beauty. “You.”

— Kennedy Ryan

109. “We all know you’re a gifted athlete, August. Don’t just show off. Show us you can lead.”

— Kennedy Ryan

110. “Damn, my head hurts. That’s what happens when Jolly the Big Ass Giant elbows you in the head.”

— Kennedy Ryan

111. “My mother’s story has no end. Her life was interrupted mid-sentence -a dangling participle. An infinite etcetera of dots, but no period.”

— Kennedy Ryan

112. “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

113. “I’ll take Banner any way I can get her. Snorted, smoked, shot in my veins. I want her with marrow-level hunger, the kind you have to dig inside your bones to satisfy.”

— Kennedy Ryan

114. “Emotion tells you about love, but hard times prove it. How can you know something is great unless it’s tested? Until then, it’s just an assumption. It’s a question, but life has a way of answering.”

— Kennedy Ryan

115. “But I want to hear the same dismay and curiosity,” he continues, his smile leveling out. “About the issues that are actually eroding our communities. Let’s ask why black men are six percent of the general population and nearly forty percent of the prison population.”

— Kennedy Ryan

116. “That’s the part of depression people don’t consider, that at times it physically hurts.”

— Kennedy Ryan

117. “Dwell in possibility.”

— Kennedy Ryan

118. “I know it’s unreasonable because I met her no more than an hour ago. We’ve had one conversation. Some people leave an impression. Lennix Moon Hunter has left more than an impression. She’s left her mark on me. And it’s shaped like a star.”

— Kennedy Ryan

119. “You heard me. I don’t have a girlfriend anymore. Cindy and I broke up.” “But I’m not your type,” I blurt. “And yet I broke up with her so you,” he says, laying the tip of one long finger on my breastbone, “would kiss me.”

— Kennedy Ryan

120. “Your views on the two-party system are well-documented and duly noted.” “I don’t understand a nation that grew so powerful using capitalism, which is essentially about choice and options and hard work, being so lazy as to give us only two options, usually bad ones, in something as crucial as leading the free world.”

— Kennedy Ryan

121. “What if he decides someday the one thing he really wants, really needs is the one thing I can never be?”

— Kennedy Ryan

122. “Extraordinary wants no parts of normal.”

— Kennedy Ryan

123. “You’re right.” I loosen my fingers from hers so I can hold her face between both hands. “Going to Houston is my best shot at winning a ring.” “Then why would you – ” “But staying here,” I cut in, caressing the fullness of her bottom lip with my thumb. “Staying is my best shot at winning you.”

— Kennedy Ryan

124. “I’ll never forget this moment when, through the abject fear and despair and exhaustion saturating her eyes, I glimpse her trust in me. It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever received.”

— Kennedy Ryan

125. “But we are sometimes in the most danger when we let our guards down, when we let peace deceive us and trick us into forgetting.”

— Kennedy Ryan

126. “But there’s something more fragile about her this time. I’m a big guy. I’m sometimes clumsy and not always careful. Whatever is fragile about her, I’d rather die than break.”

— Kennedy Ryan

127. “Grief handed me a heart of iron, and I rusted it with my tears, a muscle not made of flesh, not pumping blood.”

— Kennedy Ryan

128. “A few moments with the truth don’t chase away the lies forever,” she says, pushing back the sweat-dampened hair clinging to my face. “Lies don’t give up easily. You’ll have to remind yourself and heal yourself over and over, every time they come.” “You mean I need to talk to a therapist?” I ask. I’ve thought of that and probably will at some point. “Yes.” Her smile is that of a younger woman, knowing, teasing. “And sleep naked sometimes. Soon, you’ll want again.”

— Kennedy Ryan

129. “As the stars dim and the darkness encroaches, I understand I’m like those who stayed too long, blindly assuming their survival.”

— Kennedy Ryan

130. “I withhold nothing from him. Not my body – he can have it any way he wants it. Not my heart – flung open like a door for him to walk through. Not my soul – twisting around his every time he hammers up into me, possessing me from the inside out.”

— Kennedy Ryan

131. “Breathe in truth.” Her hands are busy in the air over me, slicing through lies. “You are pure. You are enough. You are strong.” She leans closer, her whisper as sharp and fierce as the knife in her drawer. “He can’t hurt you.”

— Kennedy Ryan

132. “He’s dictating my heartbeat, governing my pulse, holding my next breath cupped in his hands.”

— Kennedy Ryan

133. “Your dreams and ambitions got swallowed up when you had to follow Caleb,” I say, holding her eyes with mine. “I want you to know there’s someone who will follow you.”

— Kennedy Ryan

134. “Electric current spears me down the middle, landing in my core. He sucks all the oxygen from the room, and my lungs desperately push breath from my chest. He studies me under hooded lids, knowing exactly what he’s doing to me.”

— Kennedy Ryan

135. “The girl who chases stars landed on the moon, planted her flag, and I’ve been hers ever since.”

— Kennedy Ryan

136. “I know I said my compass spins.” Emotion makes it hard to get the words out. “But not with you.”

— Kennedy Ryan

137. “Let’s get some outrage over people of color getting longer sentences for the same crimes other people commit.”

— Kennedy Ryan

138. “I want you to find someone you love more than your art.”

— Kennedy Ryan

139. “She’s not someone you banished with therapy and meds. She is you. You cannot dissociate from her. Until you reconcile that, you won’t find true peace. Until you have compassion for her instead of judgment, you cannot fully heal.”

— Kennedy Ryan

140. “Funny how the words he doesn’t say can sting more than the ones he does.”

— Kennedy Ryan

141. “What?” I ask, smiling back involuntarily. “Your laugh,” he says. “I want to make you laugh like that every day.”

— Kennedy Ryan

142. “What should be foreign feels familiar.”

— Kennedy Ryan

143. “That,” she says, “is an irreversible outcome. Divorce may or may not be. Broken relationships may or may not be. You may never repair those completely, but you’re still here to try. Do you recognize what an amazing gift that is? To still be here to try?”

— Kennedy Ryan

144. “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

145. “When other people are as outraged and as curious about those problems as black people are,” he says. “Then maybe we can solve them together.”

— Kennedy Ryan

146. “I got serious the last few years about my outside reflecting the confident, powerful woman I was on the inside.”

— Kennedy Ryan

147. “I know exactly what I want.” He bends and leaves featherlight kisses on my lips. “I want another chance with you, Banner. The chance that was taken from us. I want to make love to you with the lights on.”

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

150. “Love is as strong as death.”

— Kennedy Ryan