Top 500 Kristin Hannah Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

452. “I think you stand by the people you love. That was what he’d said, and it was what she would do.”

— Kristin Hannah

453. “Love doesn’t fade or die.”

— Kristin Hannah

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

— Kristin Hannah

455. “Don’t take peace for granted, he’d said to her often. It can shatter like glass.”

— Kristin Hannah

456. “Here’s what I want you to know: I loved my life. For so long I was waiting for it to start, waiting for more. It seemed like all I did was drive and shop and wait. But you know what? I didn’t miss a thing with my family. Not a moment. I was there for all of it. That’s what I’ll remember, and they’ll have each other.”

— Kristin Hannah

457. “But how did you do that? How did two people move backward through time and untie a knot that had tangled through every moment of their lives?”

— Kristin Hannah

458. “I went in search of my mother’s life, and found my own.”

— Kristin Hannah

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

462. “The minute he saw her, he understood what had been missing from his life. It was hokey, he knew, and sentimental and sappy, but that didn’t make it any less true. What he’d been longing for, without even realizing it, had been that elusive, magical mixture of friendship and passion that he’d only ever found with her.”

— Kristin Hannah

463. “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

464. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

466. “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

467. “Daylight expanded with each breath.”

— Kristin Hannah

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

— Kristin Hannah

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

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

— Kristin Hannah

475. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

477. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

482. “In her hurt, she did what she’d always done: she disappeared. But all the while, she waited, prayed, that both her husband and her daughter would someday see how much she loved them and they would love her in return.”

— Kristin Hannah

483. “Nina lowered the camera slowly, feeling naked suddenly, vulnerable. Without that thin layer of a glass lens, she was here instead of there, looking at her father, who was dying.”

— Kristin Hannah

484. “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

485. “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

486. “Although she’d been young – only four – Isabelle thought she’d learned what alone meant, but she’d been wrong. In the three years she’d lived at Le Jardin, she’d at least had a sister, even if Vianne was never around. Isabelle remembered peering down from the upstairs window, watching Vianne and her friends from a distance, praying to be remembered, to be invited, and then when.”

— Kristin Hannah

487. “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

488. “We must never forget these remarkable women and the daring, dangerous choices they made to save others and to protect and fight for their way of life.”

— Kristin Hannah

489. “Grief is a sneaky thing, always coming and going like some guest you didn’t invite and can’t turn away.”

— Kristin Hannah

490. “For the first time in his life, he was going to be a goddamn hero.”

— Kristin Hannah

491. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

493. “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

494. “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

495. “I smile at them, my two boys who should have broken me, but somehow saved me, each in his own way. Because of them, I know now what matters, and it is not what I have lost. It is my memories. Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.”

— Kristin Hannah

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

499. “Like the famous John Muir quote – The mountains are calling and I must go.”

— Kristin Hannah

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

— Kristin Hannah