Quotes from Kristin Hannah

It's never good to sit around and wait for someone or something to change your life.

I prefer to scare myself in the ordinary ways, Daddy. Like letting my children cross the country for college. Why bungee jump when you can put a kindergartener on a school bus? Now, that's real terror.

Elizabeth: "Maybe he'll surprise you." Meghann: "Birdie, they all surprise me. Last week, I hugged my date at the door and felt a bra strap.

That's the funny thing about writing your life story. You start out trying to remember dates and times and names. You think it's about facts, your life; that what you'll look back on and remember are the successes and failures, the time line of your youth and middle age, but that isn't it at all. Love. Family. Laughter. That's what I remember when it's all said and done.

The children's lives would never be the same after today. Their opinions of everything would change, but especially their opinions of themselves, of the durability of love and the truth of their family. They would know forever that their father hadn't loved their mother--or them--enough to stay with them through hard times.

Love. It was the beginning and end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between. It didn't matter that she was broken and ugly and sick. He loved her and she loved him. All her life she had waited—longed for—people to love her, but now she saw what really mattered. She had known love, been blessed by it. Papa. Maman. Sophie. Antoine. Micheline. Anouk. Henri. Gaëtan. Vianne. She

Mama could never leave Dad, and Leni would never leave Mama. And Dad could never let them go. In this toxic knot that was their family, there was no escape for any of them.

It's like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don't stop loving a person when they're hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.

How can we call ourselves the land of the free when people are living on the streets and dying of hunger?

You know what I love most about you, Leni Allbright?" "What?" "Everything.

courage was a lie. It was just fear that you ignored.

And maybe that was how it was supposed to be, how life unfolded when you lived it long enough. Joy and sadness were part of the package; the trick, perhaps, was to let yourself feel all of it, but to hold on to the joy just a little more tightly because you never knew when a strong heart could just give out.

What did she wish? She didn't know. When she thought about it, that was the problem with her life, now and always, she'd never known what to wish for until it was too late.

Lost is lost; it's when you want someone to hold you but there is no one who can. Lost is alone, even when people are all around you.

Every choice changed the road you were on and it was too easy to end up going in the wrong direction. Sometimes, settling down

She was crying for it all at last--for the pain and loss and fear and anger, for the war and what it had done to her and to all of them, for the knowledge of evil she could never shake, for the horror of where she'd been and what she'd done to survive.

We fought, we struggled, we hurt each other, so what? That's what love is, I think. It's all of it. Tears, anger, joy, struggle. Mostly, it's durable. It lasts.

How could any woman know her own story until she knew her mother's?

it was only possible to live without love when you'd never known it.

To be a great photographer you had to see first and feel later.

Show us your true colors, who you used to be.

Children become adults who become children again.

The library. Books held the answer to every question.

If he loved you guys, he wouldn't hurt you." He made it sound so simple, as if it were a mathematical equation. But the connection between pain and love wasn't linear. It was a web.