Quotes from Kristin Hannah

The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead and that soon, come what may, we will be wholly so.   —

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

They were kids, she and Matthew; no one asked their opinion or told them anything. They just had to muddle along and live in the world presented to them, confused a lot of the time because nothing made sense, but certain of their subterranean place on the food chain.

A watering system had kept everything alive; plants, like people, learned to grow in rocky terrain.

The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.

Your're successful beyond your wildest dreams and it still isn't enough?

It was otherworldly somehow, magical in its vast expanse, an incomparable landscape of soaring glacier-filled white mountains that ran the length of the horizon, knife-tip points pressed high into a cloudless cornflower-blue sky.

Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst? Was it better not to hope at all, to prepare?

She's sick and she's been treated badly, but she can't be gone. She had the heart of a lion.

A dad... he teaches responsibility and accountability, but a mom... ah, a mom teaches her child to dream, to reach for the stars and to believe in fairy tales.

One thing I can tell you for sure is this: we only regret what we don't do in life.

a family wasn't a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn't control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart.

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

Nina had spent a lot of time with injured or dying people, standing witness, revealing universal pain through individual suffering.

She was wiser than she'd been before. Now she knew how fragile life and love were. Maybe she would love him for only this day, or maybe for only the next week, or maybe until she was an old, old woman. Maybe he would be the love of her life... or her love for the duration of this war... or maybe he would only be her first love. All she really knew was that in this terrible, frightening world, she had stumbled into something unexpected.

Love matters. Maybe its the only thing that does.

A better mother would shape that anger into loss and then, at least, into the kind of memory of love one can sustain, but Vianne was too empty to be a good mother right now. She could think of no words that weren't a lie or useless.

I don't have a good history with men." "You know the thing about history, Elsa? It's over. Already dead and gone." "They say people who don't heed history are doomed to repeat it.

You know that food eases every trouble. Angie felt herself smiling. How many times in her life had she come home from school, devastated by some social slight, only to hear Mama say, Eat something. You'll feel better.

The father who went off to war was not the one who came home. She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was as impossible as the other.

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.

Think about the women who fought for the vote. They had to be scared, too, but they marched for change, even if it meant going to jail. And now we can vote. Sometimes the end is worth any sacrifice.

I think maybe 'in love' has the shelf life of whipping cream. No matter how you handle it, it goes sour. But if you're lucky, you get past 'in love' and end up just loving someone.

Johnny looked at her. "I think we can't make people love us." "Including our parents?" Especially our parents.