Quotes from Kristin Hannah

I'm here, Mom," Julien says quietly, taking my suitcase, lifting it easily over the obstruction. The sound of his voice reminds me that I am a mother and mothers don't have the luxury of falling apart in front of their children, even when they are afraid, even when their children are adults.

Time passed slowly, in indrawn breaths and captured prayers and creaks of the chair. Vianne watched the tiny black hands on the mantel clock click forward. She patted the baby's back in rhythm with the passing minutes. Finally

Sometimes your heart got broken, but you just held on. That was all there was.

The difference between Loreda and her mother wasn't fear—they shared that. It was fire. Her mother's passion had gone out.

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.

And there it is: the core of everything. We're sisters. We know each other intimately. Our pasts, our secrets, our fears. It is a precious gift that we tried to throw away but can't really let go of.

There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

Now, she listens and agrees, and then goes on, talking about the gift of mistakes and the miracle of family. She hopes that people will learn from her bad choices. And she wraps that spell around them, the one only she can spin, and by the end of the show, her listeners are reaching for tissues and thinking about how to find their way back to their own families. The smart ones are reaching for the telephone.

From the picnic basket, she withdrew a crusty baguette, a wedge of rich, double-cream cheese, two apples, some slices of paper-thin Bayonne ham, and a bottle of Bollinger '36.

I want to imagine there will be peace when I am gone, that I will see all of the people I have loved and lost. At least that I will be forgiven.

Tragedy was like that, a razor that sliced through time, severing the now from the before, incising the what-might-have-been from reality as cleanly as any surgeon's blade.

She would hold her daughter and stroke her head and let her cry and she would have to be strong. She was so tired of being strong.

We've lived weird lives," she said. "Maybe everyone does," he said, sitting down beside her, and then lying down, pulling her into his arms.

Leni sighed. How was Mama's unshakable belief in Dad any different than his fear of Armageddon? Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?

We're all afraid," Anita said. "It's the going on that matters.

In that one image, Matthew saw the whole of his life; past, present, and future. It was one of those moments—an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world—that changed a man's life.

Her story—which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people—is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and begin again.

Madame Dufour stood at the head of the table, dressed in a severe black dress that revealed the soup spoon–sized hollow at the base of her long neck. A single diamond brooch was her only adornment (one good piece, ladies, and choose it well; everything makes a statement, nothing speaks quite so loudly as cheapness).

In that quiet, Ruby heard the echo of a broken family; they were individual pieces, now separate, wanting a wholeness that had been shattered.

allow me to be an old man for a moment and to remind a young girl who is used to being impulsive that there can be none of that anymore.

Some things in life, though, couldn't be gone in search of. They simply had to be waited for. Like the weather. You could look on the horizon and see a bank of black storm clouds. That didn't guarantee rain tomorrow. It might just as easily dawn bright and clear. There was no damn way to tell. All you could do was keep moving and live your life.

Isabelle had always been impetuous, a force of nature, really, a girl who liked to break rules. Countless nuns and teachers had learned that she could be neither controlled nor contained.

I went in search of my mother's life, and found my own.

It was all out there—the mystery, the beauty; beyond her ability to see now, but there just the same. It was simply a matter of timing and perspective, what one saw.