Top 500 Kristin Hannah Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. Not by words or anger or actions or time. I love you. I will always love you.”

— Kristin Hannah

152. “The measure of a society is its compassion.”

— Kristin Hannah

153. “If he loved you guys, he wouldn’t hurt you.” He made it sound so simple, as if it were a mathematical equation. But the connection between pain and love wasn’t linear. It was a web.”

— Kristin Hannah

154. “But when he looked at her – and she looked at him – they both knew that there was something worse than kissing the wrong person. It was wanting to.”

— Kristin Hannah

155. “You are my sunlight in the dark and the ground beneath my feet. Because of you, I can survive.”

— Kristin Hannah

156. “Sometimes being a good friend means saying nothing.”

— Kristin Hannah

157. “How could any woman know her own story until she knew her mother’s?”

— Kristin Hannah

158. “This will be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

— Kristin Hannah

159. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

160. “Why was it so easy for men in the world to do as they wanted and so difficult for women?”

— Kristin Hannah

161. “Promises were a lot like impressions. The second one didn’t count for much.”

— Kristin Hannah

162. “Stop thinking about what you’ve lost, and think about what you have left.”

— Kristin Hannah

163. “I look at him, loving this child of mine and knowing my death will devastate him. I don’t want him to watch me die by degrees. I don’t want that for his daughters, either. I know what it is like; some images, once seen, can never be forgotten. I want them to remember me as I am, not as I will be when the cancer has had its way.”

— Kristin Hannah

164. “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?”

— Kristin Hannah

165. “Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it.”

— Kristin Hannah

166. “She knew the difference between fact and fiction, but she couldn’t abandon her love stories.”

— Kristin Hannah

167. “Don’t take peace for granted. It can shatter like glass.”

— Kristin Hannah

168. “Wild. That’s how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it’s all the same to me. Alaska doesn’t attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.”

— Kristin Hannah

169. “I loved you both with all of my damaged heart.”

— Kristin Hannah

170. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

171. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

172. “At my age, I should not be afraid of anything – certainly not my own past.”

— Kristin Hannah

173. “Of course. Men always think war is about them.”

— Kristin Hannah

174. “Forgiveness doesn’t matter, does it, Dean? When a thing is done, it’s done. You can’t unring a bell.”

— Kristin Hannah

175. “The glass can be half empty or half full.” Leni knew the glass was broken.”

— Kristin Hannah

176. “Grief is a sneaky thing, always coming and going like some guest you didn’t invite and can’t turn away. She wants this grief, although she’d never admit it. lately, it’s the only thing that feels real.”

— Kristin Hannah

177. “Mama could never leave Dad, and Leni would never leave Mama. And Dad could never let them go. In this toxic knot that was their family, there was no escape for any of them.”

— Kristin Hannah

178. “You couldn’t give up you for them. But what if you wanted them more than you wanted a singular powerful you?”

— Kristin Hannah

179. “She’d been criticized for holding the reins of parenthood too tightly, of controlling her children too completely, but she didn’t know how to let go. From the moment she’d first decided to become a mother, it had been an epic battle.”

— Kristin Hannah

180. “A girl’s love for her father. Immutable. Unbearable but unbreakable.”

— Kristin Hannah

181. “She saw how love could be dangerous and beyond control. Ravenous.”

— Kristin Hannah

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

— Kristin Hannah

183. “The only real thing in this icy blue-and-black world is my daughter’s hand in mine.”

— Kristin Hannah

184. “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 re frame her life.”

— Kristin Hannah

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

— Kristin Hannah

186. “Your dad cleared out our savings account. And they won’t give me a credit card unless your father or my father cosigns.” She lit up a cigarette. “Sweet Jesus, it’s 1974. I have a job. I make money. And a woman can’t get a credit card without a man’s signature. It’s a man’s world, baby girl.”

— Kristin Hannah

187. “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.”

— Kristin Hannah

188. “The at-home mother’s life: it was a race with no finish line.”

— Kristin Hannah

189. “In time, his grief had turned to anger and then drifted toward sorrow, and now, finally, it had settled into a lingering sadness that was a part of him, not the whole.”

— Kristin Hannah

190. “My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He used to tell me that courage was a lie. It was just fear that you ignored.”

— Kristin Hannah

191. “A broken heart hurts as badly in wartime as in peace.”

— Kristin Hannah

192. “She wouldn’t have understood how dark a side love could have, how hiding it was the kindest thing you could do sometimes.”

— Kristin Hannah

193. “Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present. I want to imagine there will be peace when I am gone, that I will see all of the people I have loved and lost. At least that I will be forgiven.”

— Kristin Hannah

194. “Antoine was Julien’s father in every way that mattered. It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love.”

— Kristin Hannah

195. “They would always be a family, but if she’d learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn’t a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn’t control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.”

— Kristin Hannah

196. “Jean reached over for Elsa’s hand and held it. Elsa hadn’t known until right then how much difference a friend could make. How one person could lift your spirit just enough to keep you upright.”

— Kristin Hannah

197. “We are all fragile. It’s the thing we learn in war.”

— Kristin Hannah

198. “If love is a disease, I suppose I’m infected.”

— Kristin Hannah

199. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

200. “As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced before. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit, In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another – what we have in common – that will save us.”

— Kristin Hannah