Quotes from Kristin Hannah

That's what love is, I think. It's all of it. Tears, anger, joy, struggle. Mostly, it's durable. It lasts.

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.

She could leave them. She could break free and go her own way. It would be frightening, but it couldn't be worse than staying, watching this toxic dance of theirs, letting their world become her world until there was nothing left of her at all, until she was as small as a comma.

Sunlight changed all that, and in May, when the rains paused, bright pink and purple azaleas bloomed overnight, and everywhere was lime-green new growth—on the lawns, in the shoots of fragile leaves along the roadsides

From now on, she was Juliette Gervaise, code name the Nightingale.

It felt both profoundly magical and beautifully ordinary.

Why was it that pebbles looked like boulders until they were in your rearview mirror?

What is, is, and what isn't, isn't.

She wanted to daydream, pretend that her world was upright instead of fallen on its side;

He'd learned in the past few months that telling a girl what to wear--even one the size of a golf club--was a bad idea. Histrionics often followed.

A thing can be true and not the truth, now shush.

I was taught by my father to be afraid of the world, and some of the lessons stuck. I read about Patty Hearst and the Zodiac Killer and the massacre at the Munich Olympics and Charles Manson, and I knew the world was a terrifying place. He said it all of the time, reminded me that mountains could blow up and kill people in their sleep. Governments were corrupt. A flu could come out of nowhere and kill millions. A nuclear bomb could fall at any second, obliterating everything.

Fear was a mansion, one room after another, connected by endless hallways.

My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He used to tell me that courage was a lie. It was just fear that you ignored.

Angie: "How do I pitch these ideas to her?" Mira: "From a distance, preferably wearing body armor.

Leni felt the sudden fragility of her world, of the world itself. She barely remembered Before. Maybe she didn't remember it at all, in fact. Maybe the images she did have-Dad lifting her onto his shoulders, pulling petals from a daisy, holding a buttercup to her chin, reading her a bedtime story-maybe these were all images she'd taken from pictures and imbued with an imagined life.

He also knew that love could freeze over, become a kind of thin ice all its own.

When a man resorts to violence, he's scared," Jack said. "That's a good sign.

I do," she said quietly, stung by the sudden thought that without him, no one would know her that well.

More and more often they talked about the old days, back when they'd been too young to know that they were young, when the whole world had seemed open to them and dreams were as easy to pick as daisies.

She worked like a dog to support us, doing whatever she had to do, but each night, at bedtime, she kissed me good night and told me I could be anything in America. It was the dream that had brought her here and she passed it on to me. But, it was a lie. For people like us, anyway. Folks who are from the wrong place, or have the wrong color skin, or speak the wrong language, or pray to the wrong God.

As she neared her destination, she took her glasses off. She hadn't come to the point where she trusted the world as seen through a lens.

The truth was, she had never been able to understand how a woman could be capable of passionately adoring her husband while simultaneously despising her children. No, that wasn't right. Mom didn't despise Meredith and Nina. She just didn't care about them.

It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. "Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.