Ryan Winfield > Ryan's Quotes

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”
― Mark Twain

“Freedom lies in being bold.”
― Robert Frost

“I forgive him and like water draining from the sand after a wave, the power he held over me disappears. A slow smile rises on my face.”
― Ryan Winfield, South of Bixby Bridge

“You know why God’s so hard to find, Trevor? No, Mr. Shaw, I say, why is God so hard to find? God’s so hard to find because he ain’t lost!”
― Ryan Winfield, South of Bixby Bridge

“We should trust people to be exactly what they have proven themselves to be, no more and no less.”
― Ryan Winfield, South of Bixby Bridge

“I remember in treatment, Mr. Shaw told me that the alcohol and drugs never were my problem. He said the alcohol and drugs were my solution and that was my problem. And he was right.”
― Ryan Winfield, South of Bixby Bridge

“You know what ‘fine’ stands for, don’t you?” When Jane didn’t respond, Grace answered for her. “It stands for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.”
― Ryan Winfield, Jane's Melody

“Don’t you let fear have a place in your life, J. Not even a tiny place. Get rid of it from every hidden corner. Chase it away with the truth, and do what you want to do while you can.”
― Ryan Winfield, Jane's Melody

“Perhaps not all spirits are meant for this world, but they pass through anyway and change for the better those which are.”
― Ryan Winfield, Jane's Melody

“Okay. I don’t know if I have the right words, but love is this feeling I get when I look at you. A feeling that as long as you’re near me, or in the world even, then everything will be okay. That everything has meaning. It’s as if the world was all shades of sepia—like an old movie reel—and that everywhere I looked I saw suffering and pain. Then I heard your voice, I saw your face, and somehow the color came into everything.”
― Ryan Winfield, Jane's Melody

“Death is just the moment that your hourglass runs out of sand. That’s it. It happens to everyone eventually. All any of us gets to decide is where the sand falls.”
― Ryan Winfield, Jane's Melody

“I don't know if you're being smart or not, but I know that being smart doesn't always lead to being happy. And I'd rather be happy than anything else”
― Ryan Winfield, Jane's Melody

“I remember reading somewhere that you have to learn to love yourself before you can love someone else. But I don't think it's true. I think you have to learn to forget yourself before you can love someone else. At least I seem to forget about myself when I'm with you.”
― Ryan Winfield, Jane's Melody

“Love is life and life is good”
― Ryan Winfield, Jane's Melody

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I don’t see books. I see doors into other worlds. Windows into minds. The life of man spinning beyond time.”
― Ryan Winfield, The Park Service

“You are not defined by whoever happened to give you your DNA, Son. You’re defined by your choices. And the choices you make are yours. All yours.”
― Ryan Winfield, State of Nature

“Leaves will fall, cold will creep in
A circle of life that ends where it begins
It may take a thousand years and a thousand poems penned
But my hair will someday gray and my back will bend—
Then my shadow will join my body in the earth once again.

I know not the way, or even the when
Or who chooses that day we’re called away to ascend
But you bathed me in your bravery and forgave me my sins
You made a home in your heart for mine to live in—
And in return, my friend, this poem is my oath that a river of love will run through it until the very end.”
― Ryan Winfield, State of Nature

“The president of a democracy, he averred, had to show himself to the people, and some danger was an inescapable hazard of office. “To be absolutely safe,” he told John Nicolay resignedly, “I should lock myself up in a box.”
― Ron Chernow, Grant

“Grant proved remarkably fair-minded, declaring that “should there be any grounds of suspicion of fraudulent counting on either side it should be reported and denounced at once . . . Either party can afford to be disappointed in the result but the Country cannot afford to have the result tainted by the suspicion of illegal or false returns.”
― Ron Chernow, Grant

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“began to formulate a new law describing the relationship of protection to despondency. A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

“He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.”
― James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“In order to combat evil, the rebel renounces good, because he considers himself innocent, and once again gives birth to evil.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“A time comes when deception transforms patient hope into furious disillusionment and when the ends, affirmed with the mania of obstinacy, demanded with ever-increasing cruelty, make obligatory the search for other means.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“I believe more and more,” writes Van Gogh, “that God must not be judged on this earth. It is one of His sketches that has turned out badly.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Palante: “If there is a single and universal truth, freedom has no reason for existing.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt