Kennedy Ryan Quotes

If you were mine, Iris there would be no doubt what position you’d hold in my life. You’d be center. I’d play you at the five.

Take them back. Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.

Sometimes the heart speaks in whispers, and by the time we hear, by the time we listen, it’s too late…

Hope is the gap between what if and what is, but you have to fill that gap with a lot of hard work. And that’s what we’re going to talk about this week. Hope. Dreams. Work.

Even when you think you’re defeated, dig deeper. Go harder. Press, because there is something worth it on the other side.

Struggle does not make you weak,” she whispers back. “Struggling against those who hold us is what makes us, over time, stronger than they are. Strong enough to fight back. Strong enough to win.

finding someone you can laugh with when everything hurts—was the stuff happily ever afters were made of.

And when the years have passed, and we have watched a thousand sunsets, and we are bent, our bodies crooked with age ask me again. In the twilight, in the shadow of the life we have shared, ask me if I love you, and my heart will answer before my lips can part. My love, my life, my heart never left your hands. Always, evermore, even after. Still.

Still?” she asks with a watery smile. “Yeah.” Always. Evermore. Even after. “Still.

I heard someone say once that when you try to fix people’s hurt, you’re controlling it instead of sitting with them and connecting.

She remembered who she was and the game changed.

i cannot love you gently, it’s not in me to love in part, so I will love You completely, and a little madly . . . – Matt Spencer, Poet

I’ve fallen in love with the warrior woman who walked through fire, the one who came through stronger, reshaped by sorrow, reformed by grief, reborn in joy.

You’re right.” I loosen my fingers from hers so I can hold her face between both hands. “Going to Houston is my best shot at winning a ring.” “Then why would you—” “But staying here,” I cut in, caressing the fullness of her bottom lip with my thumb. “Staying is my best shot at winning you.

If you were mine, Iris, there would be no doubt what position you’d hold in my life. You’d be center. I’d play you at the five.

I like the color of smart, the shade of funny, and sexy is my favorite hue.

Depression,” she goes on, “is a liar. If it will tell you no one loves you, that you’re not good enough, that you’re a burden or, in the most extreme cases, better off dead, then it can certainly convince you that you’re better off without the man you love, and that, ultimately, he’s better off without you.

Iris is my constellation. She took the darkness as her cue to shine. It only made her brighter, stronger, and tonight, her hard-won glimmer lights up the sky.

Ask me when your belly is full like the moon, and our love has stretched your body with my child, leaving your skin, once flawless, now silvered, traced, scarred, I will worship you. My eyes will never stray. My heart will never wander, gladly leashed to you all my days. I am fixed on you.

Grief is a grind. It is the work of breathing and waking and rising and moving through a world that feels emptier. A gaping hole has been torn into your existence, and everyone around you just walks right past it like it’s not even there. But all you can do is stand and stare.

Don’t you feel how connected we are?” I ask. “If I break your heart, I break mine.” A sweet smile spreads over her lips and she nods.

You’re a great player, August.” She tips up on her toes until her lips are at my ear. “But I think you’ll be an even greater man.

Sometimes we hold so tightly to the hurt from the past that we miss the happiness ahead,

Dwell in possibility.

Yes.” MiMi’s affirmation infuses the air with power. “Strength. Dignity. Courage. All these things belong to you. Take them back. Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.” Yours to keep and yours to share.

A long shot?” I ask, pausing at the door to give him a cocky grin. “Last I heard, I’m pretty good at those.

The heart speaks in whispers. I heard too late.

You can’t change what has already happened. What you did or decided. So you have two choices. Wallow in it, stay in the chokehold of guilt and shame that holds you back from the next phase of your life”—she taps the pad with the pen—“or decide you’ve punished yourself long enough for things you can never change and set a date when you’ll forgive yourself and move forward.

She’s not someone you banished with therapy and meds. She is you. You cannot dissociate from her. Until you reconcile that, you won’t find true peace. Until you have compassion for her instead of judgment, you cannot fully heal.

There aren’t enough sonnets for friendship. Not enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care. They are the ones we choose to laugh and cry and live with. When lovers come and go, friends are the ones who remain. We are each other’s constants.

OVERTIME “I have been bent and broken, but - I hope – into a better shape.” -- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I love your body because it has you in it.

Ours is a love that reimagines—that peels back the sky at high noon searching for the stars, collecting them like shells in a bucket. We bathe in stardust, drink from the Milky Way, and dance on the moon. We pierce the firmament, peer into infinity, and tread on time and space. There is no before. There is no after. Now gives birth to forever. This moment may die, but this love never will. Time is not a line. It’s a circle, and we, August and Iris, we stand at the center.

Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. My generation’s out of breath. We ain’t running no more.

We both gave each other space to be misunderstood, because we really wanted to understand.

Well, a woman in this world has to keep her wits about her and her weapons at hand.

Give yourself permission to let it hurt, but allow yourself permission to let it heal.” Nikki Rowe, Once a Girl, Now a Woman

My therapist says sometimes the people who are always keeping things together are the least prepared when they actually fall apart.

And I think I’m most grateful for time, which doesn’t always heal all wounds, but teaches us how to be happy again even with our scars.

When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through. I’m a hornet. I can love. And I can sting.

My mother's story has no end. Her life was interrupted mid-sentence -a dangling participle. An infinite etcetera of dots, but no period.

There is something about falling in love with a beautiful mind ...

HOPSCOTCH.

My beloved is mine and I am his. --Song of Solomon 2:16

For black and brown girls, the world is full of sharp edges, and with every step forward, we risk being cut,

There will be men who fall in love with your skin and others who drown themselves in everything that lies beneath.” -Cindy Cherie, Poetess

a woman who wants more and realizes she deserves it is a dangerous thing.

There is no before. There is no after. Now gives birth to forever. This moment may die, but this love never will. Time is not a line. It’s a circle, and we, August and Iris, we stand at the center.

We just tiptoe around things, afraid we’ll offend or look ignorant, be misunderstood. Honesty is a risk few are willing to take.

She is day and I am night. When day and night are absolutely equal, it’s equinox. Banner is my equinox. My equal.

I have found the one whom my soul loves. --Song of Solomon 3:4

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.

There’s something helpless about truly being in love, the kind of love they write songs about, that inspires poetry and launches ships and wreaks havoc. It leaves you slightly off balance, controlling when you mean to cherish, smothering when you mean to hold close.

How do people do this? When the rug is pulled out from under the life the thought they would have forever, how do they pretend it's not seismic? That the roof hasn't fallen in and they're trapped under a concrete beam?

In my dreams I choose him, my prince, instead of the fraud. In this parallel universe, at this second-chance juncture, I turn right instead of choosing wrong… and there only there, we are together.

He’s dictating my heartbeat, governing my pulse, holding my next breath cupped in his hands.

You save all your tears for the things that set you on fire inside.

When are we ever done working on ourselves? I believe wholeness is not a destination, but a lifetime process. Something that instead of waiting for, you could be living for.

Life is a constellation of decisions, connected by coincidences and deliberations, painting pictures in the heavens. During the day, when things are brightest, we don’t see the stars, but they are there. It’s only in the contrast of night, when things are darkest, that the stars shine.

The heart speaks in whispers, but sometimes by the time we listen, it’s too late.

However imperfect she appears to some, she is ours, and we already love her deeply and will treasure any time we have with her.

And it still isn’t enough. Anything that ended would never be enough for a love like ours. A love like ours is only satisfied by forever.

Watching you guys trying to be friends is like watching porn with no penetration. Really hot, but no climax.

But we are sometimes in the most danger when we let our guards down, when we let peace deceive us and trick us into forgetting.

I come here with my heart bleeding on my sleeve, and it's still not enough for him. He needs me to cut it out and hand it to him in chunks of flesh and blood.

I’ll never forget this moment when, through the abject fear and despair and exhaustion saturating her eyes, I glimpse her trust in me. It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever received.

Traditions are the memories of those before us, breathed to life when we carry them on.

Every day that ends with me still breathing has ended well.

Love is as strong as death.

And every time I make you smile, I feel like I’ve conquered the world.

I saw you first,” he whispers, kissing the bridge of my nose where my freckles are. “I had you first.” He kisses my face where the dimple dents my check when I smile. “I want you back,” he declares, meeting my eyes and taking my mouth in a deep kiss, never looking away.

So what color am I then?” I ask before thinking better of it. He’ll probably just say I’m white, obviously. “What color are you?” he repeats, his eyes never leaving my face. “You, Bristol, are a freaking prism.

If a kiss has a color, this one is the muted shades of the sky overhead, a ménage à trois of midnight and indigo and moonshine silver. If a kiss has a sound, this one is the concert of our breaths and sighs and moans. If a kiss has a taste, it tastes like this. Hunger flavored with yearning and spiced with desperation.

Then she laughed and I wondered if this—finding someone you can laugh with when everything hurts—was the stuff happily ever afters were made of.

because first she loved herself.

When I thought of my husband, I didn’t dream in color, I dreamt in character.

don’t mind being the villain, but between you and me, we’ll know that you want it as badly as I do. I’m just the one with the balls to make it happen.

Hope is the gap between what if and what is, but you have to fill that gap with a lot of hard work.

Age ain’t nothing but a number.” “Please let Aaliyah rest in peace.

Your dreams and ambitions got swallowed up when you had to follow Caleb,” I say, holding her eyes with mine. “I want you to know there’s someone who will follow you.

There is no one else but you, my friend, my equal.” --Song of Solomon 5:2

There is no place, no spot on the continuum of time that could have hidden this man from me.

What if she gave me to you?” I bend to whisper over her lips. “What if I’m your gris gris now?

I was no walk in the park, Merry.” “Who wants to walk in the park? I think that man would run wild with you.

We splinter into a thousand pieces in her kitchen, becoming more together than we were apart. More than we were alone. With whispered promises and words of love, we exchange hearts.

Tomorrow,” she says from the screen, from a wheelchair precipitously close to the edge of a pier, “is the most presumptuous word in the world, because who knows if you even get that.

It means seeing myself clearly—good, bad, beautiful, ugly, faults, mistakes—acknowledging what I really think and feel, and not judging those emotions. Understanding myself. Not censoring it. Having compassion for myself.

Wild women are an unexplainable spark of life. They ooze freedom and seek awareness, they belong to nobody but themselves . . . she'll allow you into her chaos, but she'll also show you her magic.”—Nikki Rowe, Once a Girl, Now a Woman

You have no idea what I’d do for you if you’d let me.” He runs his thumb over my bottom lip., his touch light, but enough to seize my breath. Enough to triple my heartbeat. “But one day you will.

She’s something rare—smart, classy, gorgeous, funny, opinionated, and under it all, where she tries to hide it, kind. And burrowed beneath all of that, vulnerable. She isn’t the kind of girl you mess over.

Can you miss someone you’ve never had? Because I miss Iris. I can’t even share that with anyone because they’d think I was a lunatic. Obsessed. Fixated. I like to think of it as certain. Like when I’m in the zone, the game comes to me easily and I’m certain I’ll make every shot before the ball even leaves my hands—that’s how I feel about Iris. She’s a shot that hasn’t even left my hands, but I know will be nothing but net. I’m certain that if ever given the chance, it would be that way for us.

But it’s such a rich white,” I say, forcing my lips to stay curved. “Well, this is Tribeca,” Grip deadpans. “There’s bound to be a lot of rich whites.

I'm his and he's mine.

Dude had serious game.” Grip laughs. “No one writes about love and sex and passion like Neruda.

He studies me a moment longer, and the intimacy and openness are almost too much, but I force myself not to look away. I’ve never been more vulnerable to anyone, and I’ve never trusted anyone else the way I trust Grip— with my life, with my heart.

It begins with a tremor, a realization that love happens in the fragile context of our mortality. That love and life occur just beyond the reach of our control. There is only one letter of difference between love and lose, and somewhere along the way, for me they became synonymous. I understand now that something broke in me after my parents died that somehow healed wrong, and I started measuring how much I loved people in terms of how much it would hurt to lose them.

Winston Churchill said history is written by the victors, but I would amend that to say it’s often written by liars. History is fact. You can’t change what happened, but you can edit it. People lie and leave out the truth, bend it to suit their needs.

We feel the things we need to know instead of say them. With my chest pressed to his back, forgiveness, love, understanding, and tenderness transfer noiselessly between the layers of our clothes, an emotional osmosis through blood and bone, through hurt and fear.

Our traumas, the things that injure us in this life, even over time, are not always behind us. Sometimes they linger in the smell of a newborn baby. They surprise us in the taste of a home-cooked meal. They wait in the room at the end of the hall. They are with us. They are present. And there are some days when memories feel more real than those who remain, than the joys of this world.

The back of his hand slams into my mouth, shoving any other words down my throat. I stumble. My back hits the mirror, sending spikes of pain through my shoulder. I’ve never been hit in the face. My mother didn’t bother disciplining me. Though I saw men hit her and my aunt from time to time, no man has ever hit me, so I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known that the first hit, that baptism into violence, doesn’t just sting the flesh. It startles the soul.