Catherine Ryan Howard > Quotes

“These are no dark magicians. They have no special skills. People seem to forget that we know their names because they got caught. In fact, the only remarkable thing about them is what they took from the world: their victims. It’s their names we should know.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“None of us know what we're capable of, if the circumstances were right. Or wrong.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days

“People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it's the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course. Moments like this.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days

“You bought me a ticket to a planet where I lived by myself.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“We have these stories we tell ourselves—and other people—about ourselves, based on what happened to us in the past, or what we did, or decisions we made, and then they become our future just by the telling. It’s like a …”
“Self-fulfilling prophecy?” she offers.
“Yeah. We want things to be different but we start by telling the other person how they were the last time, and that kind of, like, limits us to being that person again ... I suppose what I'm saying is that, for once, I’d like to start something clean. Without any stories limiting where this can go, who we can be.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days

“When you find him, you’ll probably be shocked at just how much of nothing he really is.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days

“Do you ever think that maybe you have your shit together, it's just that your shit doesn't look like everyone else's?”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days

“Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days

“Dividing people into good and evil is just lazy.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days

“It’s not secrets I like. It’s discovering things that are new to me but actually were always there. Secrets are a different thing. They’re destructive.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days

“Most people who do bad things do so because a confluence of events has maneuvered them into that position and then pushed them to act, to do something out of character. How many times have we heard, ‘Oh, my Johnnie would never do that, he doesn’t have it in him, you must have the wrong house,’ or, ‘I’ve been best friends with this guy for years, I know he’s not a killer’? Yeah, he didn’t have it in him and he wasn’t a killer—until he did and he was. None of us know what we’re capable of, if the circumstances were right. Or wrong.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days

“Fiction only really worked if it was built like a lattice through which you were repeatedly offered glimpses of absolute truth.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it’s the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course. Moments like this.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days

“The world, she’d discovered, just wasn’t designed for people with open wounds.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Trap

“I had really begun to understand why people overeat. It isn't what they eat, it's why they eat it: because when you feel literally full from food, it's a brief respite from feeling figuratively empty inside.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, Run Time

“Jim opened the book. Its spine cracked loudly, like a bone.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Corruption plagued the force just as it did every other area of society. If it was noticed, it took a brave and principled member to report it, but it did happen.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“They had found an outlet, a remedy, an antidote. It was the only explanation.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Even if you were already falling, you were technically okay until you hit the ground.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“But here’s the kicker: people don’t just read true-crime books now, they study them. They go looking for more. They listen to podcasts and meet up at conventions and trade theories’ – Bernadette mimed typing on a computer keyboard – ‘online until all hours of the night. Armies of armchair sleuths.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Women were clearly the common denominator. His first three attacks focused on a woman and there was no attack that didn’t include one.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“All of Jim’s work, his caution, his skills, his planning, his genius – it was all being undone by two overgrown children. How fucking infuriating.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“We let our fathers carry our stuff up into our new rooms and our mothers make up our beds with new linen, something we probably wouldn’t do in a few months’ time after a single gender studies module convinced us we knew more about the world than our parents had learned from decades of living in it.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Liar's Girl

“I didn’t want to go but I had no choice in the matter. I was too young and too numb to recall the journey, leaving me utterly lost, disoriented, and unable to find my way back. I’m still here. Until recently, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would be forever. But something unexpected has happened. A visitor has arrived and he knows the way back. He says he’ll take me with him. We leave soon. I’m finally getting to go home.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“And I actually think that’s probably not that unusual a reaction. I mean, that’s why cars slow down when they’re passing a traffic accident, right? Or why people watch true-crime documentaries, or read books about Ted Bundy. This stuff is, in a weird way, exciting. Right?’ ‘You think that’s what Liz is?’ I said. ‘Excited?”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Liar's Girl

“When you’re twelve years old, adult life seems like an endless adventure – or rather, your adult life feels like it will be.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Someone would later tell me that denial, the first stage of grief, isn’t big and simple, like refusing to accept that someone is dead when all the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that they are. No. The real work of denial, the true intricacy of it, takes place beneath the thoughts your consciousness articulates in the nanoseconds before it does. It happens when you are presented with a set of circumstances that any person not in denial would immediately find worrying but, because you are in the midst of it, the roots of every fear bend and break, re-forming into plausible possibilities that cause you no concern. Denial is forcing boring, pedestrian explanations out of your synapses, growing them thick and uncontrolled like vines on a time-lapse video. Constantly and quickly, so nothing logical has a chance to squeeze through.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, Distress Signals

“There was an especially acute heartbreak in having secured the job you’d dreamed of having for more than half your life only to discover that, firstly, it was nothing like you’d imagined it would be and then that, secondly, it had never really been your dream job at all.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“There might be a difference between killing and being a killer.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days