Heaven Adjacent Quotes

“Because it’s everything a person needs to live a decent life. It has a stove for heat. A fridge to keep your food cold and a stove to cook it when you’re ready to eat it. It has a bathtub and a shower to get you clean after your chores and a bed to lie down in at the end of the day. And that’s all a person really needs. And I think the whole trouble with us is that we think we need so much more.” “It’s nice to have more than just the basics of survival.” “Is it? Maybe. I don’t know. I think it’s a trap. We have all this ‘stuff.’ And we think we need it. But it never feels like enough, and we only end up working to defend it, and to get more.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“I’m starting to see that we make choices at an early age,” Roseanna continued, “when we’re too young to know what will make us happy. But they’re more or less permanent choices. They don’t have to be, I guess. But somehow we end up thinking they have to be. It’s hard to make a change after so many years, and we don’t want to let people down by breaking our promises. But what we do to those poor people is worse. We blame them for the fact that we’re not happy. Because that’s easier than blaming ourselves. Because if we blame ourselves, then we have to fix it, and that’s a tricky thing.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“You can put any kind of judgment you want on the way you feel, but that won’t make it go away. Unfortunately you can’t insult your feelings out of existence. Trust me. People try all the time. If it worked, we’d know about it by now.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“But we waste our precious time. Why? Why do we live like we’re not going to die?”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“But sometimes things happen that shouldn’t happen. And sometimes there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop them. But it’s not definite yet. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“A tightening in her chest almost stopped her. It was a foreign feeling, to be so afraid of words addressed to her own son. And, in another very real way, familiar. She had stood at this threshold many times, and each time she had let that clench of fear stop her.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“Because it’s everything a person needs to live a decent life. It has a stove for heat. A fridge to keep your food cold and a stove to cook it when you’re ready to eat it. It has a bathtub and a shower to get you clean after your chores and a bed to lie down in at the end of the day. And that’s all a person really needs. And I think the whole trouble with us is that we think we need so much more.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“People come into our lives, she thought, and it’s not always a forever kind of thing, and not always meant to be. Not every deal is for keeps.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“All big changes are scary. And it’s scary to think of being without money. It doesn’t even have to be an ego thing, but it would be pretty human and normal if there was some of that mixed in. We need money to survive, and to solve basic problems. And, you know . . . they tend to come up. It’s hard to be without it, especially if you’re used to having plenty. Cut yourself a little slack.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“Wondering why life was always a process of choosing the lesser of two evils. Why couldn’t a person have all of what they’d been wanting?”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“I think the whole problem with this world is that we control our kids too much. What they naturally are just seems too darned inconvenient for us, so we get impatient with it, and we tell them not to be who they are. No good comes of it. Not in my opinion.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“It may surprise you to hear that good coffee made in shabby locations still tastes like good coffee.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“Sons get bigger and bigger and turn into grownups, but you still call them your son.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“The one where you appeal to someone’s ego. I don’t care about that stuff anymore. Whether I’m looked upon as wise or not. I don’t need to be right at this point in my life. I don’t care what other people choose to do. I just know what I want to do now.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“She glanced over her shoulder at the dog, who was still leaning nervously against the door. She shot him a look that said he was entirely to blame for all of this. He returned a look that said he accepted all that guilt and more.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“Talking to robots made real humans more robotic.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“She half stood, half floated in the water, absorbing the totality of Lance and Neal having so much shared history. So much life with each other that Roseanna knew nothing about. It felt as though someone had been watching her through one-way mirrored glass while staying safely anonymous and hidden himself. It also meant there was a great deal of her son’s life that she had missed, but that much she’d known already. It just hurt to get a good look at it in retrospect.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“People get by in all kinds of situations. All over the world people are getting by on almost nothing. Losing things they think they can’t live without. Or at least that they think they can’t be happy without. But then it’s pretty hard to be happy . . . you know . . . if it’s dependent on some material possession not going away. I don’t”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“Maybe everything deteriorates in time, and maybe that doesn’t make it any less worth having while it lasts.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“Thought about how afraid everyone is of change, and how sure they feel that their adaptation to change cannot, will not, happen. Then something new comes along, and a couple of weeks later it feels as though life has been exactly that way since the beginning of recorded time.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“You’re saying hearts are supposed to be broken. Not sure I agree, but . . .” “Right. Otherwise you’re not really using them. Which is a very cowardly way to live, don’t you think?”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“Why do we do work we hate all our lives? Somewhere earlier on the road somebody must have made us feel that we didn’t have an option to do otherwise. I’m sure it gets psychologically complex”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“keep your food cold and a stove to cook it when you’re ready to eat it. It has a bathtub and a shower to get you clean after your chores and a bed to lie down in at the end of the day. And that’s all a person really needs. And I think the whole trouble with us is that we think we need so much more.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“Because, really . . . how was she ever going to be happy if she couldn’t learn to let things like that be?”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“It’s hard to find a particular place when you don’t one hundred percent know you’re even looking for it,”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“Sooner or later you have to recognize the old patterns. But even that wasn’t enough, she now realized. It wasn’t sufficient to simply watch them play out while thinking, Yes, indeed, that is my pattern, and then continue to do it that way all the same. No. Sooner or later you had to get up off your sorry butt and do a little better for yourself.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“robe and opened the door.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“There’s a reason people will always let you down. It’s because they came to this weird planet to live their own lives. Not anybody else’s. Classic case of needs in conflict.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“whatever happens, I’ll be okay. People get by in all kinds of situations. All over the world people are getting by on almost nothing. Losing things they think they can’t live without. Or at least that they think they can’t be happy without. But then it’s pretty hard to be happy . . . you know . . . if it’s dependent on some material possession not going away. I don’t want to live like that.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent

“It’s nice to have more than just the basics of survival.” “Is it? Maybe. I don’t know. I think it’s a trap. We have all this ‘stuff.’ And we think we need it. But it never feels like enough, and we only end up working to defend it, and to get more. And we have all these labor-saving devices. So now we have this life that’s almost entirely devoid of labor. A few centuries ago, there was work involved in everyday survival. And I can’t know this for a fact, Max, but I have a really strong suspicion that not too many people were neurotic back then. Who had the time for it? Now we spend our spare time getting addicted. To drugs or alcohol, or our smartphones, or the internet, or checking our email, or shopping for all that ‘more stuff’ we think we need.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Heaven Adjacent