185 Quotes by Catherine Ryan Hyde

The most important thing I can add from my own observations is this: knowing it started from unremarkable circumstances should be a comfort to us all. Because it proves that you don’t need much to change the entire world for the better. You can start with the most ordinary ingredients. You can start with the world you’ve got.

You’re supposed to make mistakes. You’re just starting out. Mistakes are a good thing. They mean you were brave enough to try something hard.

But upset is a funny thing. It looks for places to direct itself. It’s an emotion given to action, and it needs somewhere to go. Even if it has to make something up as it goes along.

The moon shows it all. Thank god the moon is on my side. I’ll need a piece of that, a piece of Sarah, all of myself and all of Simon.

A kiss, she thinks, has to be entirely balanced – it has to have a little conflict, a little dialectic, a little revolution.

I suppose we’re built with complete free will, and as much as we’re capable of depravity, to the same degree we are wired for greatness. Everyone gets to choose, I think. And my challenge is to decide where I’ll place the bulk of my attention. What I’ll most believe in.

Situations are like that. They take up all the time you used to use for working and eating and sleeping. They soak up your whole life like a black hole in space soaks up the sunlight. And then, where you used to have a life, all you have left is a situation.

And the best way to make someone unhappy, if not downright unbalanced, is to tell her that what she sees with her own eyes is not there at all.

Sometimes when things happen you just let them go, one by one, because it’s easier. You pretend they don’t mean as much as they do. I should’ve had my eyes open about that, but you can’t go back and second-guess things. It’s just that when we sat around and thought about the things we really loved, which you do when you’re away at war, mostly what came to me were experiences.