Quotes from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“It's never been a perfect world. It's never going to be. It's going to be hard and scary, and if you're lucky, wonderful and awe-inspiring. But you have to push through the bad parts to get to the good.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“I think she was afraid to love sometimes. I think it scared her. She was the type to like things that were concrete, like the ocean. Something you could point to and know what it was. I think that's why she always struggled with God. And I think that's why she also struggled with love. She couldn't touch it. She couldn't hold on to it and make sure it never changed.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“You stay safe, You love. You survive. You laugh and cry and struggle and sometimes you fail and sometimes you succeed. You Push.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“I realize that life is risks. It’s acknowledging the past but looking forward. It’s taking a chance that we will
make mistakes but believing that we all deserve to be forgiven.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“Life is life. You choose to live it or you do not.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“We are nothing more than our stories and who we love. What we pass on, how we exist … it’s having people remember who we are. We’re terrible at that in this world. At remembering. At passing it on.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“-you can think you know someone and then they say something or do something and suddenly everything changes.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“The more we lose, the more we become the survivors.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“He presses his lips to my jaw, to the corner of my mouth, to my ear. "I promise I'll find you again," he whispers. "I promise you I'll remember you. And I promise I'll love you.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“Sometimes it’s the mistakes that turn out to be the
best parts of life,”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“I know that to you everything has changed for the worse over the last weeks. But for me..." Elias pauses. rests his forehead into the curve of my neck. "Before you my life was nothing but wandering and solitude and death. Now with you there's possibility." He pulls back until we're looking into each other's eyes. "I'm falling inn love with you, Gabrielle. Not with the person you used to be, but you.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“Do you still believe that if you truly want something enough it can happen?" I ask. I think of all the times I wanted to stop the world from spinning, all the times I wanted to go back and start over again. All the things I've wanted to undo or take back. Did I not want them enough?”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“We're both just human. Nothing more. But also nothing less.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“But of course everything presses forward, even as we dig our feet against the reality of it all.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“What use are experiences if we're not allowed to remember them? If we forget in order to avoid the pain of loss? What is the point of living if we have to always insulate ourselves?”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“So many memories roll through me and I realize that this is who we are: memories and shared experiences. This is what ties us all together.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“But that's what love is like when it's fresh and new. It's fire and thunder and heat.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“When you're young you have such expectations of each other. So many needs. And when you're older..." He shrugs. "You want someone who understands. We've lived different lives. We've loved different people. But I think that there will always be that..." He struggles for the right word. "That understanding we share. Of having grown up in the same world, of having live through the same memories.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“That's what I've started to learn about this world. It might give, but it always takes away.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“Sometimes it's those things you can't touch that you need to hold on to the most.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“You know how you can think you know someone or think you know them but maybe you only know them one way?" He sneaks a glance at me and I notice that his cheeks are red in the moonlight. "Maybe you know someone as your little sister's friend," he says. "And then maybe something shifts. Maybe one day you hear them say something unexpected. Or hear the way they laugh and then suddenly you see them all over again. Like this time it's different. This time maybe you see them as ..." He pauses. "Beautiful," he finishes. Catcher leans in closer. "Wonderful and funny.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“I realize that this is the way the world works. If I could stop the spin, stop the rotation, I would have done so long ago. I would have stopped it the first moment that Catcher's lips met mine under the moon in the amusement park. I would have held us in that eternity forever. But of course everything presses forward, even as we dig our feet against the reality of it all. One even tumbles from the next out of our control and we are dragged along, helpless.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“We will always survive. There is always hope.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“Is that all we have left? Is that all we are? Lights on a map that are slowly dying, hanging on for nothing?”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“It's the most beautiful thing in the world." he says, "I just..." He pauses and looks back into the fire. "I just kept walking. Wrapped in this white nothingness.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“She must face the forest of her mother’s past in order to save herself and the one she loves.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“It's as if everything shifts around me, the pieces that didn't fit together finally twisting until they match. The terror that had been clouding and suffocating me begins to filter away, dissipating in the night. "I want something more too," I whisper. "I want more than looking back and wishing for what was or what could have been. Who I was or could have been. I want..." I lick my lips, tasting him. "I want you.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“The morning sun burned away the mist so the valley below is now clear. The scope of what I see drowns out every other sense: There's no river, no water. Instead, hundreds of feet below the bridge the ground shifts and writhes. At first I think maybe it's a field of some sort but then individual colors begin to pull apart.

And all at once I understand what it is. Like a river flooding its banks, the entire valley is full of Mudo. The sound is not that of a raging waterfall but the pounding of two hundred million feet. The moans of a hundred million mouths. They pour through the valley, more people than I have ever seen. More people than I ever thought could have existed in one world. And they sense me, reach for me but are trapped by the mountains.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“I remember my mother telling me earlier that we are nothing more than our stories. I look at the masses of dead flesh, at all the stories that are now forever silenced.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

“We’re set in motion and then we spend our lives maintaining that motion, but to what end? For what purpose?”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dead-Tossed Waves

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