Quotes from Kristin Hannah

So now books were her only friends. She'd read Lord of the Rings so often she could recite whole scenes by memory. It was not a skill that aided one in becoming popular.

life—and the law—is hard on women. Sometimes doing the right thing is no help at all.

Jude remembered this pain. Every woman had felt some version of it: the end of first love. It was when you learned, for good and always, that love could be impermanent.

She waited for you in a thousand different ways.

Leni 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?

Then he left her there, standing alone, surrounded by word ghosts; things she could have said.

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

That was the one thing she knew now. Some chances came and went, and if you missed them, you could spend the rest of your life standing alone, waiting for an opportunity that had already passed you by.

She remembered how it had felt and tasted, that slowly descending depression, like a thick glass jar that closed around you, sucking away the air you needed to breathe, creating a barrier between you and the world. The hell of it was that she'd been able to see all that she was missing, but when she'd reached out, all she'd touched was cold, hard glass.

It was the Magic Hour, the moment in time when every leaf and blade of grass seemed to separate, when sunlight, burnished by the rain and softened by the coming night, gave the world an impossibly beautiful glow.

Nina knew the power of black and white images. Sometimes a thing was its truest self when the colors were stripped away.

Goddamn, sometimes it hurt to be free.

There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown. Elsa had survived it by being quiet, by not demanding or seeking attention, by accepting that she was loved, but unliked.

The four winds have blown us here, people from all across the country, to the very end of this great land. And now, at last, we make our stand, fight for what we know to be right. We fight for our American dream, that it will be possible again.

Men tell stories," I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. "Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.

I loved you both with all of my damaged heart.

Caro: "Bite me." Ruby: "I gave that up in kindergarten.

Sometimes you simply made the wrong choice and you had to live with it. You could only change the future.

Books + friendship = book club

Instinctively, she lifted her camera and minimized her view of the world. It was how she managed her memories, how she processed the world. In pictures. With a camera, she could crop and reframe her life.

That was the first time her grandfather had leaned down and whispered, Be brave, into her ear. And then, Or pretend to be. It's all the same.

She realized that the landscape of a woman's soul could change as quickly as a world at war.

Girls like you can't understand," Julia said, and it was true. Ellie had been popular. She didn't know that some hurts were like a once-broken bone. In the right weather, they could ache for a lifetime.

No mother. Two small words, and yet within them lay a bottomless well of pain and loss, a ceaseless mourning for touches that were never received and words of wisdom that were never spoken. No single word was big enough to adequately describe the loss of your mother.