Top 500 Kristin Hannah Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “They were standing at the top of a mountain, on a wide patch of flat land. Far below lay a vast swath of farmland, fields of green. Great rectangles of brown, newly tilled earth. “California,” Ant said. Elsa had never seen land so beautiful. So fertile. So green. California. The Golden State.”

— Kristin Hannah

452. “She is so certain of everything. This war is black and white for her. Nothing seems to scare her.”

— Kristin Hannah

453. “She worked like a dog to support us, doing whatever she had to do, but each night, at bedtime, she kissed me good night and told me I could be anything in America. It was the dream that had brought her here and she passed it on to me. But, it was a lie. For people like us, anyway. Folks who are from the wrong place, or have the wrong color skin, or speak the wrong language, or pray to the wrong God.”

— Kristin Hannah

454. “Adults always talked about mistakes, the cost of doing the wrong thing. She wished she’d listened now.”

— Kristin Hannah

455. “Life is short, her dad had said. She knew it was true. Every motherless child knew that. But just now, with her husband’s voice droning on and on, she couldn’t quite grasp hold of that. Because there was something else, equally true. When you were forty-five years old and missing out, it felt as if life were very long indeed.”

— Kristin Hannah

456. “Daylight expanded with each breath.”

— Kristin Hannah

457. “When a man resorts to violence, he’s scared,” Jack said. “That’s a good sign.”

— Kristin Hannah

458. “Lost. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them where they don’t belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.”

— Kristin Hannah

459. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

460. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

461. “She looked at Vianne, and the universe of their friendship was in her eyes – the secrets they’d shared, the promises they’d made and kept, the dreams for their children that bound them as neatly as sisters.”

— Kristin Hannah

462. “Leni hadn’t understood then. Now she did. She saw how love could be dangerous and beyond control. Ravenous. Leni had it in her to love the way her mother did. She knew that now.”

— Kristin Hannah

463. “We’ll be friends through jobs and kids and marriages.”

— Kristin Hannah

464. “That evening, after dinner, Leni sat on her twin bed, reading. The Stand by Stephen King. In the past week, she’d read three books by him and discovered a new passion. Goodbye science fiction and fantasy, hello horror. She figured it was a reflection of her inner life. She’d rather have nightmares about Randall Flagg or Carrie or Jack Torrance than about her own past.”

— Kristin Hannah

465. “Falling in love with you was the best thing I ever did.”

— Kristin Hannah

466. “He pulled back and slowly got to his feet. We’ve all been carrying this baggage for too long. Some of us have tried to go on. He looked at her. And some of us have refused to. But all of us are hurting. I’m your father. She’s your mother – whatever she’s done or hasn’t done, or said or hasn’t said – she a part of you and you’re a part of her. Don’t you see that you can’t be whole without her?”

— Kristin Hannah

467. “For years, she’d mistaken habit and affection for true love. She had assumed that the love she gave her husband was a reflection of the love he felt for her, and now, because of her blindness, she was alone.”

— Kristin Hannah

468. “But the connection between pain and love wasn’t linear. It was a web.”

— Kristin Hannah

469. “Who you mom is and how she lives her life isn’t a reflection of you. You can make your own choices. And there’s nothing for you to be ashamed of. But you’ll have to dream big, Tully.”

— Kristin Hannah

470. “She hadn’t been where it mattered, making memories with her husband and children. Maybe she’d thought time was more elastic, or love more forgiving.”

— Kristin Hannah

471. “She was a teacher, for God’s sake. What did she know to say about dangers such as these? How could she assuage a child’s fear when her own was straining at the leash?”

— Kristin Hannah

472. “They were at war. Time was the one luxury no one had anymore. Tomorrow felt as ephemeral as a kiss in the dark. She.”

— Kristin Hannah

473. “It’s too bad we don’t live life backward. I think it was Kierkegaard who said that.”

— Kristin Hannah

474. “A Russian dacha, or summerhouse, in Western Washington State. Even the orchard’s name was absurd. Belye Nochi.”

— Kristin Hannah

475. “Leni knew it was crazy, but it seemed to her as if they were having a conversation without saying anything, talking about books and durable friendships and overcoming insurmountable odds. Maybe they weren’t talking about Sam and Frodo at all, maybe they were talking about themselves and how they had somehow grown up and stayed kids at the same time.”

— Kristin Hannah

476. “In the market, tourists were still crowded around the fish stand. White-aproned vendors threw thirty-pound king salmons through the air to one another: at every toss, tourists snapped photographs.”

— Kristin Hannah

477. “She ate life with unapologetic enthusiasm and took as many helpings as she wanted.”

— Kristin Hannah

478. “Maybe she’d thought time was more elastic, or love more forgiving.”

— Kristin Hannah

479. “The idea of it, of staying here and finding a good life and a place to belong, seduced her as nothing ever had.”

— Kristin Hannah

480. “Like geese,” she whispered into the tiny, shell-pink ear, “their babies imprint on the mama in the first sighting and never forget.”

— Kristin Hannah

481. “What will we be without him?” Meredith whispered, clinging to her. “Less,” was all Nina could think of to say.”

— Kristin Hannah

482. “She thought she had grieved for Matthew, cried all the tears she had, but now she saw the desert of grief that lay before her. It could go on and on. The human body was eighty percent water; that meant she was literally made of tears.”

— Kristin Hannah

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

— Kristin Hannah

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

— Kristin Hannah

485. “That was the thing about her dad: he might be moody and sharp-tempered, even a little scary sometimes, but that was just because he felt things like love and loss and disappointment so keenly.”

— Kristin Hannah

486. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

487. “If I had told him the truth long ago, or had danced and drunk and sung more, maybe he would have seen me instead of a dependable, ordinary mother. He loves a version of me that is incomplete. I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.”

— Kristin Hannah

488. “In literature, death was many things – a message, catharsis, retribution.”

— Kristin Hannah

489. “She had felt lonely for years, but now she truly was alone.”

— Kristin Hannah

490. “Nora’s gaze was steady. “No matter how dark a place is, there are always moments of light. That’s what I passed on to you and Caroline, my moments of light.”

— Kristin Hannah

491. “I say folks who hang on to the past miss their chance for a future.”

— Kristin Hannah

492. “Regret, I know, is a powerful remainder; it can bring the strongest man to his knees.”

— Kristin Hannah

493. “The high she’d felt when he took that first breath had gone. Like getting to the top of a roller coaster: there was a nanosecond of pure exhilaration before the headlong plunge into fear.”

— Kristin Hannah

494. “A kiss?” She repeated it to stall for time. This was the sort of thing that she’d taken for granted before the war. Men desired her; they always had. She wanted that back, wanted to flirt with Henri and be flirted with, and yet the very idea of it felt sad and a little lost, as if perhaps kisses didn’t mean much anymore and flirtation even less.”

— Kristin Hannah

495. “Matthew grieved for the mother he’d had. He figured Leni would grieve for the dad she wanted.”

— Kristin Hannah

496. “But no matter how hard they all tried to be normal, their life was a dirty window that couldn’t be wiped clean. Everything, every moment, was coated by illness.”

— Kristin Hannah

497. “Apparently you couldn’t stop loving some people, or needing their love, even when you knew better.”

— Kristin Hannah

498. “I was taught by my father to be afraid of the world, and some of the lessons stuck. I read about Patty Hearst and the Zodiac Killer and the massacre at the Munich Olympics and Charles Manson, and I knew the world was a terrifying place. He said it all of the time, reminded me that mountains could blow up and kill people in their sleep. Governments were corrupt. A flu could come out of nowhere and kill millions. A nuclear bomb could fall at any second, obliterating everything.”

— Kristin Hannah

499. “But you knew, or should know, that it was a wild thing you lived with, that a collar and leash and a bowl of food might tame the actions of the beast, but couldn’t change its essential nature.”

— Kristin Hannah

500. “She cried at last, for all the times she’d had been with her father and all the times she hadn’t, and for all the times she never would be. When the tears had worn themselves out and left her dry, she got unsteadily to her feet.”

— Kristin Hannah