Kristin Hannah Quotes

Courage, Liam thought to himself, wasn't a hot, blistering emotion held only in the hands of men who joined the special forces and jumped out of airplanes and scaled unnamed mountains. It was a quiet thing, ice-cold more often than not; the last tiny piece you found when you thought that everything was gone. It was facing your children at a time like this, holding their hands and brushing their tears away when you were certain you hadn't the strength to do it. It was swallowing your own grief and going on, one shallow, bitter breath at a time.

A girl was like a kite; without her mother's strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.

I know a thing or two about jealousy, how it can cut you to the bone and bring out the worst in you.

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.

After he left the house, she dried her hair and dressed in a pair of old, comfortable jeans and a white hoodie. Ordinarily, she'd take the time to put on makeup, but today she didn't feel the need to hide anything. She was who she was: a woman who'd survived a war of the heart and had the wrinkles to prove it. (Night Road, page 382)

In sleep, I dream about the Comfort Lodge and Daniel

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." - T. S. Eliot, from "East Coker

this wasn't the end. She had to remember that. Each day she lived there was a chance for salvation. She couldn't give up. She could never give up.

To make real friends you have to put yourself out there. Sometimes people will let you down, but you can't let that stop you. If you get hurt, you just pick yourself up, dust off your feelings, and try again.

She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was impossible as the other.

You can run away from your life and your past, but there's no way to distance yourself from your own heart.

To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost.

New York was a city that showed off its greatness, sought to make tourists look at man's accomplishments with awe. D.C. knew that man's greatness lay not in stone and steel, but rather in ideas and decisions.

I know about forgiving people and loving them anyway, even after they hurt you.

She wanted to say "Don't leave me," but she couldn't do it, not again. She was so tired of begging people to love her. Besides,

You were struggling to break free of being my daughter but unsure of how to be yourself, while I was afraid to let you go. It's the circle of love.

Here's what you need to know: some cliches are true, and war is definitely hell. It's being afraid all the time, and when you're not afraid it's because you're pumped full of adrenaline you could literally burst. It's watching people who you love- really profoundly love- get blown to pieces right next to you. It's seeing a leg lying in the ditch and picking it up to put it in a bag because no man- or part of a man, your friend- can be left behind. It's the dark night of the soul. There's no front line over there. The war is all around them, every day, everywhere they go. Some handle it better than others. We don't know why, but we do know this: the human mind can't safely or healthily process that kind of carnage and uncertainty and horror. It just can't. No one comes back from war the same.

You couldn't give up you for them. But what if you wanted them more than you wanted a singular powerful you?

But that shadow self of hers wasn't so sure. The ugly, toxic thought was smaller than a drop of blood, yet it poisoned the entire stream.

watching her. No one was.

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.

And no one drank just one shot of tequila.

Her teenage daughter was sprouting like a tree, blooming every day into another variation of who she would someday become. Moods twisted her up and left her looking sometimes like a girl who'd just washed up onshore, unable to quite remember who she was and who she wanted to be. Kate

Sometimes you have to do everything right and follow the rules. You have to wait until all your ducks are in a row before you make a move. And other times ... like now ... you have to say 'what the hell' and go for it.

We are all changed by this war, Soph. Daniel is your brother now that Rachel is ... gone. Truly your brother. And this baby, he or she is innocent of ... his or her creation.'
'It's hard to forget,' she said quietly. 'And I'll never forgive.'
'But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.'
Sophie sighed. 'I suppose,' she said, sounding too adult for a girl of her age.
Vianne placed a hand on top of her daughter's. 'We will remind other, our? On the dark days. We will be strong for each other.

Their friendship was more important than any relationship. Guys would come and go; girlfriends were forever.

Perhaps that's why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.

Mr. Lundberg: "I asked you for your position on capital punishment."
Student: "Prone.

Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.

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

I can't help smiling at that. He is such an American, this son of mine. He thinks one's life can be distilled to a narrative that has a beginning and an end. He knows nothing about the kind of sacrifice that, once made, can never be either fully forgotten or fully borne. And how could he? I have protected him from all of that.

Sometimes you have to turn the world upside down to see it right side up.

In the last few moments before dawn, Vianne sat near the mound of fresh-turned earth. She wanted to pray, but her faith felt far away, the remnant of another woman's life.

He was afraid that the secrets she'd kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would
for one heartbeat
flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red.

It was like stepping barefoot on a sharp bit of broken glass. She pulled the glass out and ran on, but the pain remained.

Have we? Have we lost our light, or have we perhaps just glimpsed it for the first time?

Do I look like the mastermind of this? I just do what I'm told. They tel me to arrest the foreign-born Jews in Paris, so I do it. They want the crowd separated - single men to Drancy, families to the Vet d'hie Viola! It's done. Point rifles at them and be prepared to shoot. The government wants all of France's foreign Jews sent east to work camps, and we're starting here.'
All of France? Isabelle felt the air rush out of her lungs. Operation Spring Wind. 'You mean this isn't just happening in Paris?'
'No. This is just the start.

I have never known how to say goodbye. It is a failing that has been with me all of my life. It's especially problematic, given how often partings have come up.

He'd learned in the past few months that telling a girl what to wear
even one the size of a golf club
was a bad idea. Histrionics often followed.

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

This is what they have done to us. We are afraid of our own shadows." She

Night rather than to gobble it all up at once. And

Bitterness would do you good. All that smiling and pretending of yours would give me hives.

What good did it do to light the world on fire if she had to watch the glow alone?

I am stronger than I use to be. As I say the words, I realize the truth of them. I am stronger now. Strong enough to reach for this dream ... and strong enough to handle disappointment.

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

You will always miss her. There will be days - even years from now - when the missing will be so sharp it will take 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.

Show us your true colors, who you used to be.

But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.

Quit pouting, girl. All a Milquetoast ever gets is wet.

boy. Clark Gable, maybe.

There are always times in life that you don't fit in. But you have to go forward and make a place for yourself. That's what growing up is all about. Being strong and believing in yourself-even when you're most afraid.

You said I was supposed to shoot you if you even thiught about narriage before thirty. You want to amenr that?

Some people see a glass as half empty; some see it as half full. I put the glass in a cupboard and forget it's there. You get my point?

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.

We asked so little of ourselves - and most of us got exactly what we asked for. Funny how that works.

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.

hidden from her. Still, the air is lighted and bright.

Claire knew she loved her daughter too much; it was dangerous to need another human being so desperately, but Claire had never known any other way to love.

And before you barrel through some idiotic Cosmo girl list of how-well-do-you-know-your-man questions, let me say that I don't know squat about him except that he kisses like a god and screws like a devil.

We women make choices for others, not for ourselves, and when we are mothers, we ... bear what we must for our children. You will protect them. It will hurt you; it will hurt them. Your job is to hide that your heart is breaking and do what they need you to do.

We can't live other people's lives for them. Even if we love them.

Sometimes being a good friend means saying nothing.

Popularity means people think they know you.

Walk. Run. Ride.

Fifteen minutes later, Betsy came thundering down the stairs. "I'm going to the mall with Sierra to see a movie."
Michael leaned forward, switched off the television. "Can you please rephrase that in the form of a question?"
"Sure. Can I have some money?

Didier. Anyway, there is a man, a printer, risking his life to make tracts that we can distribute. Maybe if we can get the French to

Vietnam ... war ... it did something to us. Or maybe not. Maybe the bad seeds were always in me, and war gave them a dark place in which to grow.

Get what?" she asked, but she didn't want to hear. "That every time we kiss, it's good-bye.

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.

The quarterback? Wow. My mom wouldn't let me stand in the same checkout line as a high school senior. She's so lame.
She's not lame.
She thinks eighteen year old boys are dangerous. She calls them penises with hands and feet. Tell me that isn't lame.

Memories are who we are, Tul. In the end, that's all the luggage you take with you. Love and memories are what last.

You don't reason with men like Hitler.

After so many solitary years, spent tucked away in convents and forgotten in boarding schools, Isabelle never took for granted the fact that now she had friends, people whom she cared about and who cared about her.

Magic to be its best must be unexpected".

hugged him tightly and then

I could tell you it was a Jean Valjean sort of stay and you would think it was romantic.

It was one of those moments - an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world - that changed a man's life.

Protest. Vianne was not alone in her desire to pretend

Don't be who you needed to be over there. Come home to the people who love you. I wish to hell I'd figured out a way to do that.

If wishes were horses, all beggars would ride.

She had this terrible, irrational fear that if she let go of him she would never touch him again and the thought of that was paralyzing.

Angie: "How do I pitch these ideas to her?"
Mira: "From a distance, preferably wearing body armor.

He wanted to be angry, to scream and rail and feel honest-to-God outrage. But he wasn't that kind of man. His love for Mikaela was more than just an emotion; it was the sum total of who he was. This one thing he knew above everything else. He loved Mikaela too much. Which in its way was as bad as loving someone not enough.

She had fallen into the fathomless gray that warped a mind and made a mother keep holding on long after hope was gone.

Someone told her she couldn't do something; she did it. Every barrier she turned into a gate.

Coffee?" Isabelle finger-combed her hair and tied a cotton scarf around her head. "No, merci, it is too precious." The old woman gave her a smile. "No one suspects a woman my age of anything. It makes me good at trading. Here." She offered Isabelle a cracked porcelain mug full of steaming black coffee. Real coffee. Isabelle wrapped her hands around the mug and breathed deeply of the familiar, never-again-to-be-taken-for-granted aroma. Madame

What's more serious than a kiss on the brink of war?

Love. Family. Laughter. That's what I remember when it's all said and done. For so much of my life I thought I didn't do enough or want enough. I guess I can be forgiven for my stupidity. I was young. I want my children to know how proud I am of them, and how proud I am of me. We were everything we needed - you and Daddy

She had always been a woman with laserlike focus. When she started something, there was no halfway, no easy beginning. It was this trait that had broken her.

I once read a Stephen King book that used the term SSDD. Same shit, different day.

From now on, she was Juliette Gervaise, code name the Nightingale.

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.

I just want to keep you safe.
I smile. Americans can be so naive.

Husbands were to be avoided in the pre-thirty years. There was always time for marriage and children; was the common refrain. You couldn't give up you for them. But what if you wanted them more than you wanted a singular, powerful you? No one ever talked about that.

She knew now that no one could be neutral - not anymore - and as afraid as she was of risking Sophie's life, she was suddenly more afraid of letting her daughter grow up in a world where good people did nothing to stop evil, where a good woman could turn her back on a friend in need.

The lights are going out all over Europe; We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. - SIR EDWARD GREY, ON WORLD WAR I

Your children are French-born citizens," the policeman said. "You may leave them here. They're not on my list.

He is a man, and he is afraid. This is not a good combination.

It felt as if she were bleeding - but it wasn't blood that leaked out of her, not something that could be easily transfused. Instead she was losing her dreams.