Quotes from Kristin Hannah

Maybe time didn't heal wounds exactly, but it gave you a kind of armor, or a new perspective. A way to remember with a smile instead of a sob. Maybe

wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. —ATTICUS FINCH, FROM HARPER LEE'S TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD  

I'm going to go in. Meredith will need some help. Don't stay out here too long." "Why not?" her mother said, staring at the copper column. "You'll catch pneumonia." "You think I could die from the cold? I am not a lucky woman.

Yelling was like a bomb in the corner: you saw it, watched the fuse burn, and you knew when it would explode and you needed to run for cover. Not speaking was a killer somewhere in your house with a gun when you were sleeping.

He was a shooting star and he blinded me with his light.

Finding your passion isn't just about careers and money. It's about finding your authentic self. The one you've buried beneath other people's needs.

Liam tried to imagine what it must be like to have a mother like this. What a power it must grant a person in life to have a place where you could always land softly, even after the hardest hit.

what it felt like to curl up in bed against the same body every night for thirty years, to wake to the same loving face. He wanted to ask if love was a safe harbor or a stormy sea.

Your mama told me that if a girl grows up smelling sea air, she can never really breathe inland.

music; the wave tops form notes and rise up and

There's no why to trust. It either is or isn't.

That was the sly, ruinous thing about motherhood, the thing that twisted your insides with guilt and made you change your mind and lower your standards: giving in was so damned easy. It

There were journeys in life no one could take for you.

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.

A life, not merely an existence. That was her dream: a world in which her life and her choices were not defined by the rheumatic fever she'd contracted at fourteen, a life where she uncovered strengths heretofore unknown, where she was judged on more than her appearance.

Now it would never happen; she would never get to know her father, never feel the warmth of his hand in hers, never fall asleep on the divan beside him, never be able to say all that needed to be said between them. Those words were lost, turned into ghosts that would drift away, unsaid. They would never be the family maman had promised. "Papa," she said; it was such a big word suddenly, a dream in its entirety.

Five words to change a world, to dissolve the ground beneath a woman's feet. It was a tidal wave, that sentence, whooshing in without warning, undermining foundations, leaving homes crumbled in the aftermath.

I know I won't be able to stand on the edge of intimacy. Sooner or later, I will have to dive into those cold, deep waters, and there is no end to the ripples my entrance will make. I

Elizabeth laughed. "No way. You'll have to talk to Dad about this yourself, but I'll tell you this, honey, it's dangerous to quit something because you think you're not good enough. That can be an ugly pattern that repeats itself throughout your life. Believe me, I know.

how dark a side love could have, how hiding it was the kindest thing you could do sometimes.

She was crying for all of it at last—for the pain and loss and fear and anger, for the war and what it had done to her and to all of them, for the knowledge of evil she could never shake, for the horror of where she'd been and what she'd done to survive.

Even if I could forgive him, how would I forget?

I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.

Before this trip and all that she'd learned about the three of them, she would have gotten angry or changed the subject. Anything to obscure the pain she felt. Now she knew better. You carried your pain with you in life. There was no outrunning it.