Top 500 Kristin Hannah Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “I know I won’t be able to stand on the edge of intimacy. Sooner or later, I will have to dive into those cold, deep waters, and there is no end to the ripples my entrance will make. I.”

— Kristin Hannah

402. “He was trying to make it up to her, asking for forgiveness and seeking redemption all at once, sacrificing himself for her. It was a glimpse of who he’d once been, the poet her maman had fallen in love with. That man, the one before the war, might have known another way, might have found the perfect words to heal their fractured past.”

— Kristin Hannah

403. “She wanted to be with him, and though the realization frightened her, it also set her heart racing with anticipation. When she was with Nick, she was a different woman. Some of his glitter fell onto her and made her feel beautiful and sparkly and more alive.”

— Kristin Hannah

404. “Now, darlin’, you know that social etiquette is bred into us Southern girls.” “Oh, please. You’re as Southern as Tony Soprano.” Mama sniffed. “I swear, I should have left you by the side of the road in Wheeling, West Virginia.” “You did leave me there.”

— Kristin Hannah

405. “How can we call ourselves the land of the free when people are living on the streets and dying of hunger?”

— Kristin Hannah

406. “Inside was a library unlike any Leni had ever seen. Row upon row of wooden desks, decorated with green banker’s lamps, were positioned beneath an arched ceiling. Gothic chandeliers hung above the desks. And the books! She’d never seen so many. They whispered to her of unexplored worlds and unmet friends and she realized that she wasn’t alone in this new world. Her friends were here, spine out, waiting for her as they always had.”

— Kristin Hannah

407. “Mama and dad had run off together; theirs was a beautiful, romantic story of love against all odds. Mama had quit high school and “lived on love.” That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.” – pg 23.”

— Kristin Hannah

408. “She would hold her daughter and stroke her head and let her cry and she would have to be strong. She was so tired of being strong.”

— Kristin Hannah

409. “When you get older, you’ll understand. There’s a certain comfort in the familiar.”

— Kristin Hannah

410. “While they were virtual roller coasters of emotion, you needed to be calm, always.”

— Kristin Hannah

411. “He taught her something new about friendship: it picked right back up where you’d left off, as if you hadn’t been apart at all.”

— Kristin Hannah

412. “She ought to have recognized love’s scarcity early on. If success were gold, lying in rivers, love was a diamond, buried hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the earth and unrecognizable in its natural form.”

— Kristin Hannah

413. “White sheets flapped in the breeze and roses tumbled like laughter along the ancient stone wall that hid her property from the road.”

— Kristin Hannah

414. “The children’s lives would never be the same after today. Their opinions of everything would change, but especially their opinions of themselves, of the durability of love and the truth of their family. They would know forever that their father hadn’t loved their mother – or them – enough to stay with them through hard times.”

— Kristin Hannah

415. “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.”

— Kristin Hannah

416. “He had the kind of smile that inhabited every part of his face – his eyes, his cheeks; there was even a dimple.”

— Kristin Hannah

417. “Sometimes a mood changes on its own... Sometimes it needs a shove.”

— Kristin Hannah

418. “Elsa felt a deeply rooted shame in her daughter’s rejection. 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. Until then, she dared not push too hard or demand too much.”

— Kristin Hannah

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

422. “When you’re a mom, you learn about fear. You’re always afraid. Always. About everything from cupboard doors to kidnappers to weather. There is nothing that can’t hurt our kids, I swear.” She turned. “The irony is they need us to be strong.”

— Kristin Hannah

423. “Sometimes you have to fight for the thing that will complete you.”

— Kristin Hannah

424. “She knew sorrow would hit her later, hit her hard, the sudden, aching realization that her father was Gone, that she’d never pick up the phone and hear his voice again, or go to her mailbox and get a letter written in his bold, sweeping hand.”

— Kristin Hannah

425. “What did she wish? She didn’t know. When she thought about it, that was the problem with her life, now and always, she’d never known what to wish for until it was too late.”

— Kristin Hannah

426. “There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown.”

— Kristin Hannah

427. “Time and again, she had returned to God, pleading for help, promising her faith. She wanted to believe that she was neither alone nor in charge, but rather that her life was unfolding according to His plan, even if she couldn’t see it.”

— Kristin Hannah

428. “The true voyage of self-discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. – MARCEL PROUST.”

— Kristin Hannah

429. “We remember the missing as much as the lost, don’t we?”

— Kristin Hannah

430. “That spring, rain fell in great sweeping gusts that rattled the rooftops. Water found its way into the smallest cracks and undermined the sturdiest foundations. Chunks of land that had been steady for generations fell like slag heaps on the roads below, taking houses and cars and swimming pools down with them.”

— Kristin Hannah

431. “People left, and if you loved too deeply, too fiercely, their swift and sudden absence could chill you to the soul.”

— Kristin Hannah

432. “Now, she listens and agrees, and then goes on, talking about the gift of mistakes and the miracle of family. She hopes that people will learn from her bad choices. And she wraps that spell around them, the one only she can spin, and by the end of the show, her listeners are reaching for tissues and thinking about how to find their way back to their own families. The smart ones are reaching for the telephone.”

— Kristin Hannah

433. “In that one image, Matthew saw the whole of his life; past, present, and future. It was one of those moments – an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world – that changed a man’s life.”

— Kristin Hannah

434. “Night swept in like nothing Leni had ever seen before, like the winged shadow of a creature too big and predatory to comprehend.”

— Kristin Hannah

435. “Shadows crept along the ground like slowly seeping India ink, moved up the sides of the house, and slipped through the slats on the picket fence. Sunset tinted the sky purple and pink.”

— Kristin Hannah

436. “We have always been the witnesses of each other’s lives. Isn’t that what family is? Even broken and betrayed and bleeding, we are connected.”

— Kristin Hannah

437. “Her beauty had always made it easy for her to break rules without reprisal.”

— Kristin Hannah

438. “That’s why you’re so strong and I’m not.” “You will have to be,” Isabelle said. “For Sophie.” Vianne drew in a breath. And there it was. The reason she couldn’t eat a bowl of arsenic or throw herself in front of a train.”

— Kristin Hannah

439. “So that was how they would do it, merge back into the driving lane after a blown tire. They would say ordinary things and pretend none of it had happened. Until the next time.”

— Kristin Hannah

440. “Annie had made so many mistakes, and most of them had been because she’d planted herself firmly in the middle of the road. But now she knew that life without risk was impossible, and if by chance you stumbled across a safe, serene existence, it was because you’d never really reached for anything in the first place.”

— Kristin Hannah

441. “In Paris, with a glass of wine in your hand, you can just be.”

— Kristin Hannah

442. “But he wasn’t that man anymore. He had lost too much, and in his loss, he’d thrown more away.”

— Kristin Hannah

443. “Men are stupid. You might as well learn that now. Look at bull moose. They ram into each other at full speed. Same with Dall sheep. This will be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

— Kristin Hannah

444. “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

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

— Kristin Hannah

446. “Although she hadn’t seen her parents for years, it turned out that a parent’s disapproval was a powerful, lingering voice that shaped and defined one’s self-image.”

— Kristin Hannah

447. “Love doesn’t fade or die.”

— Kristin Hannah

448. “Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?”

— Kristin Hannah

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

— Kristin Hannah

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

— Kristin Hannah