Quotes from Kristin Hannah

My skin has the crinkled appearance of wax paper that someone has tried to flatten and reuse. My eyes fail me often—in the darkness, when headlights flash, when rain falls. It is unnerving, this new unreliability in my vision. Perhaps that's why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.

We'll be friends through jobs and kids and marriages.

She thought she had grieved for Matthew, cried all the tears she had, but now she saw the desert of grief that lay before her. It could go on and on. The human body was eighty percent water; that meant she was literally made of tears.

History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit, In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another--what we have in common--that will save us.

hope felt like a borrowed sweater that didn't quite fit.

She] 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?

Motherhood at times like this—most times—was about the steel in your spine, not the bend.

In the naïveté of youth, her parents had seemed like towering presences, omnipotent and all-knowing. But they weren't that; they were just two broken people.

With the wisdom of time and the passing of years, she knew that. She knew, too, that love didn't evaporate. It faded, perhaps, lost its weight like bones left out in the sun, but it didn't go away.

For most of her life she'd been able to box up bad memories or disappointments and store them deep in the back of her mind, in a place so dark they couldn't be seen.

It was the very bleakness of winter that made spring possible.

Alone is overrated," he said simply.

She is angry. And angry people make mistakes in war and die.

If I'm finally taking a trip into the unknown; there ought to be photographs to document this momentous event.

It hurts almost more than I can bear. Tears sting my eyes again; I wipe them away impatiently. I am so tired of crying, so tired of feeling like half a person, but I don't know how to change things... (I have never felt so lost and alone.)

You're stronger than you think you are. You can get through this, whatever happens, you can get through it. Just don't forget...the rain. It's an angel's tears. And every glass you've ever seen is half full. Don't let yourself forget that. I know what it does to a person... forgetting that hope is out there.

For a magnificent moment, the world fell away and she was somewhere else, before now, or long from now, and she wasn't hungry or tired or scared or angry. She simply was. She closed her eyes and felt at peace for the first time in years. Safe.

The love of books, of reading. There is nothing a librarian likes better than sharing her love of words with a child.

No matter how dark a place is, there are always moments of light.

Once, she had taken love for granted. Never again. Love was the sun and the moon and the stars in a world that was otherwise cold and dark.

Her beauty had always made it easy for her to break rules without reprisal.

You are my sunlight in the dark and the ground beneath my feet. Because of you, I can survive

It's funny how things slip away, pieces of us, even.

If ever I am inclined in the future to disbelieve in love, I will remember this moment.