“I keep telling you the future isn't set in stone. It's not all decided yet. The future is just what's down the road we decided to walk on today. You can change roads anytime. And that changes where you end up.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“I think you can scare somebody out of doing something, but not out of feeling like they want to.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“Funny how a thing like that can be so damned important, but you don't know it's important until an instant later in the big scheme of time. Then you go back and try to retrieve it. You tell yourself it's in there somewhere. But it's really in that no-man's-land of the moment before you woke up and started paying attention to your own life.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“I'd tell you to be careful, except for two things. One, it wouldn't do any good anyhow. And two, I think we tell each other that too much. Be careful. Don't get hurt. Don't take changes. Don't try anything. Don't feel. Might as well be telling each other not to be alive at all. Boils down to the same thing.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“Stella says when we were kids and things got bad she would go outside herself. She said she would be in a spot near the ceiling in the corner of the room. Watching. Like everything was happening to somebody else. Like you watch a movie on a screen.
Not me. I tuck in. I go into an even deeper place in myself. And I pull the covers in over me. And then I dare you to find me. You have to find me to touch me or hurt me. At least, the part of me that really counts. I go inside and just hold very still. And part of me feels dead. Like it doesn't matter. Whatever it is. It just doesn't matter.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“It's like if someone had a loaded gun in your face. I don't know how else to describe how it felt to try to talk to my father. Even on a good day. If someone always has a loaded gun in your face, you weigh every word before you say it. You only dare say it if it might save you. But you're never sure, so there's this tendency to freeze. Say nothing at all.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“Even if we had to go back, I decided it was worth it to ride that bus all the way out here. It was worth it just for Natalie to see the windmills. Even if she never saw anything like this again. Maybe at least she could hang on to the idea that there's something better out there, somewhere.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“And then, every time I didn't see her, there was a fall involved. I thought about dancing on the fifth-floor ledge outside out apartment. Every train she wasn't on felt something like hitting the pavement from five floors up. So maybe my father was right about that. Maybe happiness and excitement really are dangerous things.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“It struck me that this was the second time in a couple of days that just yelling someone's name on the street could have spelled disaster. Then it struck me how wrong that was. To have to keep your life sectioned off like that. A signal that you'd fallen into a bad way to live.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“Ah, yes. That. The sin of being happy or excited. According to my father, we must guard carefully against such things. According to my father, these emotions are the equivalent of dancing on out fifth-floor window ledge. Clearly inviting a nasty fall.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“It's like, if you love somebody. When they hurt you or let you down, you let ‘em know you still love them. That's called unconditional love. Anybody can love somebody when they're making you happy. That requires no special talent. That's also how most people do it. But when you get a little wiser, you know you got to love somebody with all their faults. So,”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“My mother had this thing she used to say. Before she died. “Nearly everything is easier to get into than it is to get out of.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“Whatever big hole people got in their heart, they want something to fill it up. That's what he wants from you. But he'll never get it. Because you can't ever fill a hole in you with somebody else. But everybody keeps trying, though, even though it never brings nothing but heartache to both parties.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“Well, child, I'd tell you to be careful, except for two things. One, it wouldn't do any good anyhow. And two, I think we tell each other that too much. Be careful. Don't get hurt. Don't take chances. Don't try anything. Don't feel. Might as well be telling each other not to be alive at all. Boils down to the same thing.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“This is the part that's going to be hard to explain: How can I tell you why two people who were afraid of everything—other people, open places, noise, confusion, life itself—wound up riding the subways alone under Manhattan late at night? Okay, it's like this: When everything is unfamiliar and scary, your heart pounds just getting change from the grocery cashier. That feels like enough to kill you right there. So the danger of the subways at night can't be much worse. All danger begins to fall into the same category. You have no way to sink any deeper into fear. Besides,”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“Is that really love? When it happens so fast?
She sighed. Paused the movie. Sighed again.
Some would say it's only love after you've been together long enough to work out who takes out the trash. And there's something to that. That part of love where you have to work at it. Learn to live together. But when you set eyes on that person, it's something. Call it what you want. If it turns into love, then maybe it's just love in all its stages. It's still real”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
“Nearly everything is easier to get into than it is to get out of.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Chasing Windmills
Catherine Ryan Hyde
Born place: in Buffalo, NY, The United States
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“I'm doing my job, Jan, and it's fucking killing me with how I'm being made to dance naked in different whore-house windows.”
― Jack L. Pyke, quote from Backlash
“We'll see what you find out," Stew said. "You'll find out what it feels like to be thrown from a speeding train to the rocky bottom of a drained sea. Except you won't really find out, because you'll be dead. Get it? What I mean is, it'll kill you when I throw you from this train so you'll be in no state to find out what it feels like. Get it? Due to your death by falling from a train.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?
“Let’s get some sleep,” he whispered. “Before dawn we’ll see what we can gather up.”
His eyes rested on her forehead, on the new bruises and gashes from the Juggernaut blast.
“You look awful,” he said.
Camille narrowed her eyes to slits. She grabbed the lamp from his hands. “Thank you very much.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, following her as she climbed the narrow stairwell.
“You look just as whipped,” she said over her shoulder. Camille already felt like a load of dung-her head throbbed, her limbs ached, and the rope marks around her wrists burned. She didn’t need to be told she looked dreadful, too.
“The bruises, Camille. Your injuries look awful, not you,” he said. She walked down the hallway in self-conscious silence.”
― Angie Frazier, quote from Everlasting
“It wasn’t that she didn’t want to die. Nor was it that she wanted to live. She just didn’t want to give up.”
― Fuyumi Ono, quote from The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow
“It’s the correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm, it’s a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one’s farm—it’s not life, it’s egoism, laziness, it’s monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Racconti
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