Carrie Ryan > Quotes

“I want to sleep, I want dreams to pull me from this world and make me forget. To stop the memories from swirling around me. To put an end to this ache that consumes me.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth

“It's not about surviving. It should be about love. When you know love...that's what makes this life worth it. When you live with it everyday. Wake up with it, hold on to it during the thunder and after a nightmare. When love is your refuge from the death that surrounds us all and when it fills you so tight that you can't express it.”
― Carrie Ryan

“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, 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, 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, The Dead-Tossed Waves

“Suddenly, all I can think about are all the things I don't know about him. All the things I never had time to learn. I don't know if his feet are ticklish or how long his toes are. I don't know what nightmares he had as a child. I don't know which stars are his favorites, what shapes he sees in the clouds. I don't know what he is truly afraid of or what memories he holds closest.
And I don't have enough time now, never enough time. I want to be in the moment with him, feel his body against mine and think of nothing else, but my mind explodes with grief for all that I am missing. All that I will miss. All that I have wasted.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth

“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, The Dead-Tossed Waves

“I don't understand how I can know so little about love and how it works. How I can be so bad at it when it's all I've ever wanted.
All I've ever known is about leaving or being left.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Dark and Hollow Places

“Survivors aren't always the strongest; sometimes they're the smartest, but more often simply the luckiest.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Dark and Hollow Places

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

“Who are we if not the stories we pass down? What happens when there's no one left to tell those stories? To hear them? Who will ever know that I existed? What if we are the only ones left -- who will know our stories then? Who will remember those?”
― Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth

“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, The Dead-Tossed Waves

“It's one thing to know a truth in your head but another to understand it in your heart.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Dark and Hollow Places

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

“You think you want love, Mary. You think it is this beautiful gift that does nothing but fill you and make you whole. But you are wrong. Love can be cruel and ugly. It can become dark and cause the deepest pain.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth

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

“The broken ones need someone to fight for them even harder.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Dark and Hollow Places

“I realize that sometimes death comes before you expect it. That while we are rarely prepared for our friends, family and loved ones to die, we are never prepared for our own deaths. Never prepared to reconcile our own regrets.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth

“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, The Dead-Tossed Waves

“Life is never that simple. And the fact that it's not that simple to you means only one thing: You're still alive.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Dark and Hollow Places

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

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

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

“I know,' Jed says. I'm thrown over his shoulder and I can feel how his body shakes and I know that he is crying. For me, for Beth. And I wonder if there was ever a crueler world than this one that forces us to kill the people we love most.”
― Carrie Ryan

“It wouldn't have mattered if they were scratches or not," he says, his voice like liquid. "I was bitten during the escape from the house." My limbs go weak, everything inside me folding in collapsing on itself.

"I was already dead," he says, opening his eyes.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth

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