Just a Regular Boy Quotes

“Every strange thing you see everybody do,” she said, “that’s it. That’s the fear. Every time you look at a person and their behavior is a mystery to you, that’s their fear. All the rage you see in the world. All the arguments and the wars and the guns. All the loud music and the big monster trucks and the expensive, fancy cars, and the political rallies. That’s all the fear that people don’t want to admit they have.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“Sure, bad stuff happens, but it won’t happen to us.’ But this is different. This is something you do with your eyes open. You look at the world, see it for exactly what it is, and then make this conscious choice to be part of it. It’s a better deal, really. I like it. In a shaky, ambiguous sort of way.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“Just don’t sell it until after we bury him up there.” He looked around the table. “Will you all come this time? Because I really hate it there. And the more of you guys that are there with me, the less upset I’ll get.” “Absolutely,” Chris said. “We’ll go as a family.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“There are lots of wild animals up there,” Remy said to his sister. “That’s why I tried to bury him. So the animals wouldn’t get him. But still, if we bury what we’ve got, that’s better than not burying him at all.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“You get some sleep now,” she said. Then she kissed him lightly on the forehead, and she was gone. The moon stayed with him.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“And she was still stroking his hair, and that was nice, too. It felt almost like she loved him.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“He put himself to bed in his father’s bunk, because it didn’t matter where he slept anymore. The lower bunk could just as easily be his bed now. And that was the moment it hit him. Really, fully hit him. Both of his parents were dead, and he was completely and utterly alone.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“We wake up and walk out into the world like, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ And meanwhile we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, and there are mass shootings every time we turn around, and we’re at each other’s throats politically and every other way I can think of, and we just live our lives anyway.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“If anyone could understand the kind of trauma that bubbles up after you’ve been delivered to safety, it was these two.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“the owner of the store wouldn’t die if Remy took some of his food. Remy would die if he didn’t.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“Maybe death would feel like nothing at all. Maybe it would literally be a portal into nothing. It was a comfort to think about knowing nothing, and feeling nothing. Everything he had been feeling for years, everything he could imagine feeling ever again, was deeply unwelcome. He covered himself with both blankets and all three tanned deerskins.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“Other people’s problems. O.P.P. are always easy. It requires a damned impressive set of chops to take on your own.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“Not all of our growth will happen in a straight line,”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“Oh yeah. All of us. Janie and Peter, too. But now I think it’s better that we did go through it, because before . . . it was almost like this state of denial. Like, ‘Sure, bad stuff happens, but it won’t happen to us.’ But this is different. This is something you do with your eyes open. You look at the world, see it for exactly what it is, and then make this conscious choice to be part of it. It’s a better deal, really. I like it. In a shaky, ambiguous sort of way.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“There’s no reception up there,” Remy’s father said at long last. “Because there are no cell towers.” Remy wondered sometimes if the long pauses before answers were his father’s attempt to get Remy to figure things out on his own. But he was never right at the edge of understanding,”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“If you listen to people, they’ll tell you a lot, even when they don’t mean to.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“I’m just a human, among billions of other humans, and I’m alive, and it’s really hard being alive, and I don’t want to admit it, because nobody around me is admitting it, and most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m scared.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“The fact that you do something as a result of an old, deeply internalized experience doesn’t necessarily make it a bad thing to do.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“That’s pretty much the definition of a marriage, wouldn’t you say? Two people are what they are, and they want what they want. Some of that works well for the other person, and some of it causes problems. The two people try to find some compromise or common ground. If they can’t, and it can’t be lived with, then the marriage is over.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“It’s better to do what you can, fitness-wise, than to do nothing at all.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“Pain had simply become a condition he had no expectation of living without.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy

“When he woke in the morning, his father still had not come back. That was when Remy fully came to understand fear. He thought he had felt it all along. But in that fulcrum of a moment, he realized he had only understood a sort of miniature fear, like fear’s little brother.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Just a Regular Boy