Quotes from Kristin Hannah

Fear, Leni learned, was not the small dark closet she'd always imagined; walls pressed in close, a ceiling you bumped your head on, a floor cold to the touch. No. Fear was a mansion, one room after another, connected by endless hallways.

Some lives are not ours to hold on to; God makes His choices without us.

The measure of a society is its compassion.

The lights are going out all over Europe; We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. —SIR EDWARD GREY, ON WORLD WAR I

She'd learned how to disappear in place long ago. She was like one of those animals whose defense mechanism is to blend into the landscape and become invisible. It was her way of dealing with rejection: Say nothing and disappear. Never fight back. If she remained quiet enough, people eventually forgot she was there and left her alone.

When times is tough and jobs is scarce, folks blame the outsider. It's human nature.

Everyone up here had two stories : the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any Life that could be imagined could be lived up here.

Mama had quit high school and "lived on love." That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

There was something she hadn't known when she went into marriage and became a mother that she knew now: it was only possible to live without love when you'd never known it.

If she wasn't careful, she'd slide without a ripple into the gently flowing stream of her old life, pulled back under the current without a wimper of protest. Another housewife lost in the flow.

I can't help smiling at that. He is such an American, this son of mine. He thinks one's life can be distilled to a narrative that has a beginning and an end. He knows nothing about the kind of sacrifice that, once made, can never be either fully forgotten or fully borne. And how could he? I have protected him from all of that.

He has been in her heart for so long it is as if she knows him already, but she doesn't. She does not know what to say or how to say it, and suddenly she is afraid that there is a wrong way to move forward, a mistake that once made cannot be undone.

This time I really am going to light the world on fire,' she said, laughing. 'I finally have a fucking match.

Sometimes holding on was all you could do.

In the mirror, she'd seen more than her face. She'd seen the girl she'd been before all of this. A dreamer, a believer. Someone who would go places. How had she forgotten all of that?

Asking yourself a question, that's how resistance begins. And then ask that very question to someone else. —REMCO CAMPERT

He leans close and kisses each of my cheeks, whispering, "I loved her all of my life," as he draws back.

The glass can be half empty or half full." Leni knew the glass was broken.

Leni felt distance spreading between them. That was how change came, she supposed: in the quiet of things unspoken and truths unacknowledged.

Antoine was Julien's father in every way that mattered. It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love.

Real friends. The kind that don't purposely hurt your feelings or stop liking you for no reason.

He was afraid that the secrets she'd kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would--for one heartbeat--flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red.

A dark purple sky filled with the first few evening stars made her feel small. She smiled; that was what she expected from the sky. All her life, she'd gone out at night and stood beneath that blue velvet darkness. It was her temple, the true house of God, and it never failed to remind her of her place.

If love is a disease, I suppose I'm infected.