Top 180 Kennedy Ryan Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— 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. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

130. “What should be foreign feels familiar.”

— Kennedy Ryan

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

135. “Nothing against fake lashes. I just don’t like it when the woman blinking them is fake, too.”

— Kennedy Ryan

136. “Tomorrow,” she says from the screen, from a wheelchair precipitously close to the edge of a pier, “is the most presumptuous word in the world, because who knows if you even get that.”

— Kennedy Ryan

137. “How do people do this? When the rug is pulled out from under the life the thought they would have forever, how do they pretend it’s not seismic? That the roof hasn’t fallen in and they’re trapped under a concrete beam?”

— Kennedy Ryan

138. “Children and bored adults need to be entertained. Grown men living with purpose require time and quiet and energy.”

— Kennedy Ryan

139. “What color are you?” he repeats, his eyes never leaving my face. “You, Bristol, are a freaking prism.”

— Kennedy Ryan

140. “I guide her back down to the couch, and with a hand at her shoulder, urge her to stretch out. I’d shave points off my GPA for a glimpse of her, but she doesn’t want that. I get it, so I settle for a taste.”

— Kennedy Ryan

141. “A miracle you can count on.”

— Kennedy Ryan

142. “The heart speaks in whispers. I heard too late.”

— Kennedy Ryan

143. “I don’t give a damn about odds,” she says. “Odds don’t tell me what I can’t do. Odds just tell me how hard I’ll have to work to get what I want. Don’t allow anyone to make you feel less.”

— Kennedy Ryan

144. “It means seeing myself clearly – good, bad, beautiful, ugly, faults, mistakes – acknowledging what I really think and feel, and not judging those emotions. Understanding myself. Not censoring it. Having compassion for myself.”

— Kennedy Ryan

145. “Thank you, MiMi.” I blink at my tears with my head tucked into her long, silver braid. “I feel so weak sometimes, and you make me feel strong.”

— Kennedy Ryan

146. “I don’t know if it’s mine or if it’s hers, but this moment, this perfect glass-blown moment where our bodies unite and our souls intersect, this moment belongs to us.”

— Kennedy Ryan

147. “Oh.” That’s the best I can do. It’s been so many years, and I hope we can put this behind us, but I hadn’t planned on confronting this particular demon for Christmas.”

— Kennedy Ryan

148. “I love your body because it has you in it.”

— Kennedy Ryan

149. “He’s looking at me like I’m the sunrise and he’s grateful for a brand new day.”

— Kennedy Ryan

150. “But now and for the rest of my life, Kai is the living, breathing address that is my home. She’s my entire damn zip code. In.”

— Kennedy Ryan