Quotes from Kristin Hannah

She wanted to pray, but her faith felt far away, the remnant of another woman's life.

You will always miss her. I know that from experience. There will be days—even years from now—when the missing will be so sharp it takes your breath away. But there will be good days, too; months and years of them. In one way or another, you'll be searching for her all your life. You'll find her, too. As you grow up, you'll understand her more and more. I promise you that.

I turn to Kate, see her glowing face and her beautiful green eyes. In them, I see my whole life. Everything I've ever been, and ever wanted to be. That's what your best friend is: a mirror.

The truth is, I knew loss. I didn't know grief. Now, I do.

Elsa thought of all the laundry she'd done in her life, the joy she'd always taken in hanging sheets to dry, but never until now had she fully, deeply appreciated the sheer physical pleasure of clean sheets on naked skin. The fresh smell of lavender soap in her hair.

family stood poised on the edge of a great precipice that could collapse at any second, crumble away like the houses that crashed down Seattle's unstable, waterlogged hillsides.

It was the truest fact of her world. She loved everything about this man, his smile, the way he mumbled in his sleep and laughed after a sneeze and sang opera in the shower. She

After that, they got hot dogs at a frankfurter stand and walked down the wharf. At Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe they saw shrunken heads and Egyptian mummies and cheap souvenirs. (Meg didn't point out the eight-foot-long petrified whale penis that hung suspended from the ceiling; she could just imagine what Ali would tell her friends.)

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.

As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is in the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is in my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is in the beating of my heart. I cannot now imagine a life without her. I

How could you hold on to ideals when you were sick and cold and starving?

You will have to be," Isabelle said. "For Sophie." Vianne drew in a breath. And there it was. The reason she couldn't eat a bowl of arsenic or throw herself in front of a train.

Fleetingly he wondered what the man's life had been like, where it had gone so desperately wrong. No one tried to end up like this, alone and defenseless and poor, eking a living from the harsh Arizona desert.

Mama was engaged in a continual quest to "find" herself. In the past few years, she'd tried EST and the human potential movement, spiritual training, Unitarianism. Even Buddhism. She'd cycled through them all, cherry-picked pieces and bits. Mostly, Leni thought, Mama had come away with T-shirts and sayings. Things like, What is, is, and what isn't, isn't. None of it seemed to amount to much.

In real life, she saw, it wasn't like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.

We are all fragile, Isabelle. It's the thing we learn in war.

housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.… The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

And the best way not to care was to surround yourself with noise and people.

There was a parking ticket on her windshield. She rolled down her window and reached out, yanking the paper from beneath the rusted windshield wiper. She wadded it into a ball and tossed it out the window. To her mind, ticketing this rattrap and expecting to get paid was like leaving a bill on the pillow at a homeless shelter.

A man. It was always about the men. They seem to think it meant nothing to cook and clean and bear children and tend gardens. But we women of the Great Plains worked from sunup to sundown, too, toiled on wheat farms until we were as dry and baked as the land we loved.

In earlier years, she had dreamed of boldly reaching for him, changing how they touched each other, exploring his body with her hands and her mouth; then, upon waking, she'd felt frustrated and swollen with a desire she could neither express nor share. She'd waited years for him to see it, see her, and reach out.

That evening, after dinner, Leni sat on her twin bed, reading. The Stand by Stephen King. In the past week, she'd read three books by him and discovered a new passion. Goodbye science fiction and fantasy, hello horror. She figured it was a reflection of her inner life. She'd rather have nightmares about Randall Flagg or Carrie or Jack Torrance than about her own past.

By the time she reached her floor, Ruby was wheezing so badly she sounded like Shelley Winters after her swim in The Poseidon Adventure, and she was practically that wet. Sweat slid down her forehead and caught on her eyelashes, blurring everything.

You can't unlove someone even if you want to, even if he breaks your heart.