Top 500 Kristin Hannah Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

203. “Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst? Was it better not to hope at all, to prepare? Wasn’t that what her father’s lesson always was? Prepare for the worst.”

— Kristin Hannah

204. “In the years that she had been tying scraps to the branches, the tree had died and the fruit had turned bitter. The other apple trees were hale and healthy, but this one, the tree of her remembrances, was as black and twisted as the bombed-out town behind it.”

— Kristin Hannah

205. “This is how my love for her goes on: in moments remembered and moments imagined. It’s how I keep her alive. Hers is the voice in my head, my conscience. I see the world, at least in part, through her eyes. Her story – which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people – is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and begin again. Love is what remains.”

— Kristin Hannah

206. “I am like some wounded animal in a darkened lair, nursing the thorn in my paw, unable to find anyone to take it out.”

— Kristin Hannah

207. “Missing him. Longing for him. Worrying about him. Those were her nighttime journeys.”

— Kristin Hannah

208. “I had forgotten how gently time passes in Paris. As lively as the city is, there’s a stillness to it, a peace that lures you in. In Paris, with a glass of wine in your hand, you can just be.”

— Kristin Hannah

209. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

211. “I think maybe ‘in love’ has the shelf life of whipping cream. No matter how you handle it, it goes sour. But if you’re lucky, you get past ‘in love’ and end up just loving someone.”

— Kristin Hannah

212. “In the silence, Leni wondered if one person could ever really save another, or if it was the kind of thing you had to do for yourself.”

— Kristin Hannah

213. “It isn’t about being at the same school or the same town or even the same room. It’s about being together. Love is a choice you make.”

— Kristin Hannah

214. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

215. “A watering system had kept everything alive; plants, like people, learned to grow in rocky terrain.”

— Kristin Hannah

216. “Alaska brings out the best and the worst in a man. Maybe if you’d stayed Outside you never would have become who you are now. I know about ‘Nam, and it breaks my heart what you boys went through. But you can’t handle the dark, can you? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Most folks can’t. Accept it and do what’s best for your family.”

— Kristin Hannah

217. “My skin has the crinkled appearance of wax paper that someone has tried to flatten and reuse. My eyes fail me often – in the darkness, when headlights flash, when rain falls. It is unnerving, this new unreliability in my vision. Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.”

— Kristin Hannah

218. “I was not good at the whole making-death-a-positive-transition thing. How could I? I wanted her to fight to the last breath. It was a mistake. I should have listened to her fear, comforted her. Instead I’d promised her that everything would be okay, that she would heal.”

— Kristin Hannah

219. “I can be a little OCD when it comes to my writing.”

— Kristin Hannah

220. “I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste all that was. Antoine was Julien’s father in every way that mattered. It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love.”

— Kristin Hannah

221. “Teach the boys how to be gentlemen and Marah how to be strong.”

— Kristin Hannah

222. “Hope. A shiny thing, a lure for the unwary. She knew how seductive it could be, and how dangerous.”

— Kristin Hannah

223. “He started to cry, and she pulled him into her arms. It took perhaps the greatest courage of her life to let go of him.”

— Kristin Hannah

224. “Some lives are not ours to hold on to; God makes His choices without us.”

— Kristin Hannah

225. “It was ridiculous. She knew crying wouldn’t help, because she cried in her sleep. Night after night she woke with tears on her cheeks, and none of it helped one bit. In fact, the opposite was true. The expression of grief didn’t help. Only its suppression would get her through these hard times.”

— Kristin Hannah

226. “She needed Matthew, but not to save her or complete her or reinvent her. Her love for him was the clearest, cleanest, strongest emotion she’d ever felt. It was like opening your eyes or growing up, realizing that you had it in you to love like this. Forever. For all time. Or for all the time you had.”

— Kristin Hannah

227. “She is like a child picking at a scab, unable to stop herself even though she knows it will hurt.”

— Kristin Hannah

228. “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

229. “Books had always been her solace; novels gave her the space to be bold, brave, beautiful, if only in her own imagination.”

— Kristin Hannah

230. “Before this trip and all that she’d learned about the three of them, she would have gotten angry or changed the subject. Anything to obscure the pain she felt. Now she knew better. You carried your pain with you in life. There was no outrunning it.”

— Kristin Hannah

231. “Their kiss was sad, an apology almost, a reminder of what they’d once shared.”

— Kristin Hannah

232. “Another promise made by a man who’d kept too few.”

— Kristin Hannah

233. “Passion is a thunderstorm, there and gone. It nourishes, si, but it drowns, too.”

— Kristin Hannah

234. “Love is such a slippery thing.”

— Kristin Hannah

235. “When you’re a mom, you learn about fear. You’re always afraid. Always. About everything from cupboard doors to kidnappers to weather.”

— Kristin Hannah

236. “Of course you can fall in love. You just have to let yourself. They don’t call it falling for nothing. -Kate.”

— Kristin Hannah

237. “Leni stared down at the sea, rolling inexorably toward her. Nothing you did could hold back that rising tide. One mistake or miscalculation and you could be stranded or washed away. All you could do was protect yourself by reading the charts and being prepared and making smart choices.”

— Kristin Hannah

238. “Your mama told me that if a girl grows up smelling sea air, she can never really breathe inland.”

— Kristin Hannah

239. “Mama gave a tired laugh. Leni understood. You could be as careful as a chemist with nitroglycerin around dad. It wouldn’t change a thing. Sooner or later, he was going to blow.”

— Kristin Hannah

240. “She is angry. And angry people make mistakes in war and die.”

— Kristin Hannah

241. “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

242. “My dearest Tully – I am so sorry. I know how afraid you are of being alone, of being left behind, but God has His plan for all of us. I would have stayed with you longer if I could have. Your grandfather and I will always be watching out for you from Heaven.”

— Kristin Hannah

243. “Sometime – she didn’t know when – she closed her eyes and reached out, placing a hand in the hollow of his stomach, feeling it rise and fall with his breathing. It was like resting her hand on the ocean in summer, when the tide was coming in.”

— Kristin Hannah

244. “For the first time, her romantic novels made sense; she realized that the landscape of a woman’s soul could change as quickly as a world at war.”

— Kristin Hannah

245. “From the picnic basket, she withdrew a crusty baguette, a wedge of rich, double-cream cheese, two apples, some slices of paper-thin Bayonne ham, and a bottle of Bollinger ’36.”

— Kristin Hannah

246. “If she wasn’t careful, she’d slide without a ripple into the gently flowing stream of her old life, pulled back under the current without a wimper of protest. Another housewife lost in the flow.”

— Kristin Hannah

247. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

248. “She knew suddenly that a woman could change her whole life and uproot her existence with one choice. Taking.”

— Kristin Hannah

249. “Hope was an elevator right now, broken from its cables.”

— Kristin Hannah

250. “Vianne knew Rachel wasn’t asking how to hide in the barn; she was asking how to live after a loss like this, how to pick up one child and let the other go, how to keep breathing after you whisper “good-bye.” “I can’t leave her.”

— Kristin Hannah