Quotes from Kristin Hannah

Thoughts—even fears—were airy things, formless until you made them solid with your voice, and once given that weight, they could crush you.

Someone said to me once that Alaska didn't create character; it revealed it.

Elsa had made a point of never seeing them or speaking to them again, but even so, their absence caused an ache that wouldn't go away. Apparently you couldn't stop loving some people, or needing their love, even when you knew better.

When you're a mom, you learn about fear. You're always afraid. Always. About everything from cupboard doors to kidnappers to weather. There is nothing that can't hurt our kids, I swear...the irony is they need us to be strong

In the past days, she'd come to understand the importance of upheaval. The tallest mountains were created by violence and chaos; like them, a woman's independence was born of fire.

They were so...larger than life, these Yanks, with their ready smiles and booming voices. And their gratitude....She'd lost track of the times an American had hugged her so tightly she'd come off her feet.

I love you, Papa," she said quietly, realizing how true it was, how true it had always been. Love had turned into loss and she'd pushed it away, but somehow, impossibly, a bit of that love had remained. A girl's love for her father. Immutable. Unbearable but unbreakable.

Should that be enough for her? Was she wrong to want passion? To dream of something—someone—more? She'd always imagined love to be turbulent and volatile, an emotion that would sweep her up and break her to pieces and reshape her into someone she couldn't otherwise have become.

Don't take peace for granted, he'd said to her often. It can shatter like glass.

He renamed her, just like that, turned her into a different woman.

You shine a light on hard times. This is what your pictures do. You do not let people look away from that which hurts.

world could tumble, change radically in two days, with just one less person living in it.

She was mad at the world, and somehow that meant she was mad at her mom most of all.

Tully shook her head. "Marah, your mother loves you no matter what and she's proud of you. Believe me, princess, that's the coolest thing in the world.

I close my eyes and in the darkness that smells of mildew and bygone lives, my mind casts back, a line thrown across years and continents.

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.

It was only possible to live without love when you'd never known it.

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? Wasn't that what her father's lesson always was? Prepare for the worst.

They couldn't touch my heart. They couldn't change who I was inside. My body...they broke that in the first days, but not my heart, V. Whatever he did, it was to your body, and your body will heal.

Love. It was the beginning and the end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between. It didn't matter that she was broken and ugly and sick. He loved her and she loved him. All her life she had waited--longed for--people to love her, but now she saw what really mattered. She had known love, been blessed by it.

apparently there was an expiration date on grief. It was like an exterior door closing; once it shut and you were in the dark, you were supposed to forget how much you missed the light

She tucked her chin, squared her shoulders, and set a new goal for herself.

he would learn that some roads could not be refound and that true love took time and effort Ã¢â'¬Â¦ that a life lived in the glare of summer sunlight never produced a rainbow.

Time heals all wounds, people told her, underscoring its essential kindness. She knew in fact that some wounds deepened over time instead of lessened;