Top 180 Kennedy Ryan Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I touch my face and my fingers come away streaked with paint, smeared with pain and degradation.”

— Kennedy Ryan

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

112. “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

113. “My waters rise, and like a river bursting free of its banks, I overflow.”

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

118. “Love is as strong as death.”

— Kennedy Ryan

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

125. “No matter what happens, my heart and my soul, I give them to you. They’re yours to keep.” “Yours to keep,” I echo back to him, threading our fingers together. “The only thing that’s true, that’s real, is this, Pep.” He pulls my other hand over his heart, pressing his hand over mine. “So you don’t have to worry about losing me. You can’t lose me. My soul is lodged that deeply in yours. I’m completely yours.”

— Kennedy Ryan

126. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

128. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

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

— Kennedy Ryan

131. “I’m so ready, Bristol could breathe on me and I’d probably come all over her.”

— Kennedy Ryan

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

137. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

144. “Your story is your most powerful weapon. We must use our hurts to help. I.”

— Kennedy Ryan

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

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

— Kennedy Ryan

149. “A miracle you can count on.”

— Kennedy Ryan

150. “It’s us admitting to the universe we don’t have all the answers. Too often religion says yes, I do have all the answers, and if you don’t like them, you can’t sit at my table. So we have all these tables. Too many tables, and not enough love.”

— Kennedy Ryan