Kristin Hannah

“It's not a date. I bought my own drink and I didn't shave my legs.”

“I kept an image of you in my mind through all of it.”

“She waited for you in a thousand different ways.”

“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.”

“It had been years since she question his fidelity, but he'd stepped on to the old fame track again, and that was where the road had taken them before. Infidelity could be forgiven, but forgetting it was impossible. Strangely, that wasn't what bothered her the most. What bothered her was that she didn't really care.”

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

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

“The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life.....Each decision seems as insignificant as a left turn on an unfamiliar road when you have no destination in mind. But the decisions accumulate until you realize one day that they've made you the man that you are.”

“There's nothing wrong with being scared...It happens to all of us. What's wrong is if we don't try things because we're afraid. We can't hide away from the things that scare us.”

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

“Nobody's strong enough to be a parent. We just do it, blindly, going forward on faith and love and hope. That's all it is...Being afraid...and going on.”

“Love meant always being a little afraid.”

“what shall we drink to?" "How about family?" Stacy said, showing up just in time to pour a fourth shot. "To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost." and she clicked glasses with mom”

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

“Abuse can make an animal mean.”

“Terrible beautiful combination of happiness and pain.”

“We all make mistakes, its horrible, I can’t handle it, there are several things I regret.”

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

“A dark purple sky filled with the first few evening stars made her feel small. She smiled; that was what she expected from the sky. All her life, she'd gone out at night and stood beneath that blue velvet darkness. It was her temple, the true house of God, and it never failed to remind her of her place.”

“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.”

“The falling apart of a man's life should make more noise. It should startle passesrby with its Sturm and Drang. It ought to sound like the Parthenon crashing down. Not this ordinary, everyday kind of quiet...He closed his eyes...And still it was quiet, this falling apart of his life, as silent as the last beat of an old man's heart. A quiet, echoing thud, and then...nothing.”

“Tragedy was like that, a razor that sliced through time, severing the now from the before, incising the what-might-have-been from reality as cleanly as any surgeon's blade.”

“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.”

“Liam learned that it was possible to appear to move forward when you were really standing still.”

“She didn't know that some hurts were like a once-broken bone. In the right weather, they could ache for a lifetime.”

“As she neared her destination, she took her glasses off. She hadn't come to the point where she trusted the world as seen through a lens.”

“Oh, Mia. You haven’t even begun to find out who you really are, and, believe me, other boys are going to fall in love with you. If a guy can’t see how special you are, he isn’t good enough for you.”

“It’s a promise ring,” he said solemnly. “The lady at the store said it’s what you give the girl you love. It means I want to marry you someday.”

“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.”

“Life is messy-- especially now-- it will help if you accept the mess and let it be.”

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

“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.”

“In the sea of grief, there were islands of grace, moments in time when one could remember what was left rather than all that had been lost.”

“From the first time we met, we knew everything that mattered about each other, didn't we? We just knew. I guess that's what best friends are: parts of each other.”

“I might screw up, I might embarrass you, I might yell at you, but I will never, ever stop loving you. You're my first born. The first time I held you... I fell in love so hard it cracked my bones.”

“She had been ready to love this man from the moment she first saw him. In all these years, that had never changed. They'd hurt each other, let each other down, and yet, here they were after everything, together. She needed him now, needed him to remind her that she was live, that she wasn't alone, that she hadn't lost everything.”

“Sometimes holding on was all you could do.”

“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.”

“By the time this damn war's over, we'll have hundreds of thousands of severely traumatized soldiers trying to put the pieces of their lives back together.”

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

“Marriages go through hard times. Sometimes you have to get in there and fight for your love. That's the only way for it to get better.”

“We are what we do and say, not what we intend to.”

“When you get . . . to the end, you see that love and family are all there is. Nothing else matters.”

“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.”

“Nina stared at the woman who had raised her and saw the truth at last. Her mother was a lioness. A warrior. A woman who’d chosen a life of hell for herself because she wanted to give up and didn’t know how. And with that small understanding came another, bigger one. Nina suddenly saw her own life in focus. All these years, she’d been traveling the world over, looking for her own truth in other woman’s lives. But it was here all along, at home with the one woman she’s never even tried to understand. No wonder Nina had never felt finished, never wanted to publish her photographs of the woman. Her quest had always been leading up to this moment, this understanding. She’s been hiding behind the camera, looking through the glass, trying to find herself. But how could she? How could any woman know her own story until she knew her mother’s? ”

“Unaware of Nina, the woman paused at the riverbank and looked out over the scar on the land where the water should run. Her expression sharpened, turned desperate as she reached down to touch the child in her arms. It was a look Nina had seen in woman all over the world, especially in times of war and destruction. A bone-deep fear for her child’s future…Someday her portraits would show the world how strong and powerful women could be, as well as the personal cost of that strength…She heard Danny come up beside her. “Hey, you.”She leaned against him, feeling food about her shots. “I just love how they are with their kids, even when the odds are impossible. The only time I cry is when I see their faces with their babies. Why is that, with all we’ve seen?”“So it’s mothers you follow. I thought it was warriors.”

“Real friends. The kind that don't purposely hurt your feelings or stop liking you for no reason.”

“That was her mistake. She'd pinned her happiness to a teenage girl's chest. Idiot. The realization made her almost smile. She certainly knew better than that.”

“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.”

“This time I really am going to light the world on fire,' she said, laughing. 'I finally have a fucking match.”