Quotes from Kristin Hannah

This is what my story gave them, and in the past ten years, we have loved enough for a lifetime. I think, Good-bye, my girls. I love you. I have always loved you. And I go.

That was her mistake. She'd pinned her happiness to a teenage girl's chest. Idiot. The realization made her almost smile. She certainly knew better than that.

You couldn't control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.

He had abandoned her after all; it filled her with the kind of bone-deep disappointment she knew so well. Had she learned nothing in life? People left. She knew that. They especially left her.

I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I'd like to be known.

Sometimes a thing was its truest self when the colors were stripped away.

Her father was dying. Nothing could change that. Words were like pennies, fallen into corners and down the cracks, not worth the effort of collecting.

The Mularkeys all saw love as a durable, reliable thing, easy to recognize... Love could be more fragile than a sparrow's bone.

Inside was a library unlike any Leni had ever seen. Row upon row of wooden desks, decorated with green banker's lamps, were positioned beneath an arched ceiling. Gothic chandeliers hung above the desks. And the books! She'd never seen so many. They whispered to her of unexplored worlds and unmet friends and she realized that she wasn't alone in this new world. Her friends were here, spine out, waiting for her as they always had.

One of the drawbacks of sleeping with whores, he thought lazily. You got what you paid for, and not a goddamn thing more.

She was touching his body with her tongue, and he felt it there, but somehow what she was doing went deeper. As if that gentle, moist tongue of hers were flicking his heart as well.

People left, and if you loved too deeply, too fiercely, their swift and sudden absence could chill you to the soul.

A girl was like a kite; without her mother's strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.

There are always times in life that you don't fit in. But you have to go forward and make a place for yourselg. That's what growing up is all about. Being strong and believing in yourself-even when you're most afraid.

You can run away from your life and your past, but there's no way to distance yourself from your own heart.

Leni was pretty sure that, to her, childhood would always smell like sea air and cigarette smoke and her mother's rose-scented perfume.

Sometimes being a good friend means saying nothing." "I'm just supposed to watch her make a mistake?" "Sometimes, yes. And then you stand by to pick up the pieces.

The landscape of a woman's soul could change as quickly as a world at war.

Mama gave a tired laugh. Leni understood. You could be as careful as a chemist with nitroglycerin around dad. It wouldn't change a thing. Sooner or later, he was going to blow.

In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are. Today's young people want to know everything about everyone. They think talking about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.

Ever since you were a girl, you've been running for what you wanted... Now you're lost, but you're still running full speed... How will you ever figure out what you want when everything is a blur?

She pouted prettily, and he wondered if that was one of the things they taught wealthy young girls at schools like Miss Porter's. If not, it had been passed down from one generation to another as carefully as the secret of fire.

We women make choices for others, not for ourselves, and when we are mothers, we . . . bear what we must for our children. You will protect them. It will hurt you; it will hurt them. Your job is to hide that your heart is breaking and do what they need you to do.

But he wasn't that man anymore. He had lost too much, and in his loss, he'd thrown more away.