Top 180 Kristin Harmel Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “There’s danger in being principled in the midst of a war, but I believe that it’s more dangerous not to be.” “What do you mean?” He seemed to be searching for the words. “I mean that I would rather die knowing I tried to do the right thing than live knowing I had turned my back. Do you understand?”

— Kristin Harmel

102. “Humans had a responsibility to do more than just protect themselves. In the face of evil, they were compelled to save each other.”

— Kristin Harmel

103. “Please, don’t apologize. These are the moments I live for. Reuniting a book with its rightful owner can be magical.”

— Kristin Harmel

104. “Because books bring us to another time and place,” the.”

— Kristin Harmel

105. “Yona shook her head. “He sees me as more than I am, I think.” “No. He sees you for exactly who you are. And that is very difficult for him.”

— Kristin Harmel

106. “Most people find themselves charmed by me eventually. Now come, are you trying to leave a trail behind us on the streets of Paris? Are we Hansel and Gretel?”

— Kristin Harmel

107. “There was a difference between honoring the past and being trapped by it.”

— Kristin Harmel

108. “The word choice was strange, but I nodded, because she was right. It was inconvenient to love someone who would never love you the same way, because it held you back in life. It tied you to something you could never have.”

— Kristin Harmel

109. “The thing is, not every happily ever after needs to end with a Prince Charming.”

— Kristin Harmel

110. “I meant that in a way I’m like Dorothee, aren’t I? I’m on a great adventure and one day I’ll find my way home.”

— Kristin Harmel

111. “They are erasing us, and we are helping them. “Because someone should remember. How else will they find their way home?”

— Kristin Harmel

112. “Some chapters must be finished, though, some books closed.”

— Kristin Harmel

113. “I mean that love is all around us,” Alain says. “But the older we get, the more confusing it becomes. The more times we’ve been hurt, the harder it is to see love right in front of us, or to accept love into our hearts and truly believe in it. And if you cannot accept love, you can never really feel it.”

— Kristin Harmel

114. “But I think you stand to lose far more when your heart is closed,” Chaim said. “That is no life.”

— Kristin Harmel

115. “This is where the war in Europe ended, on May 7, at 2:41 in the morning.” “Wait, World War II ended here? In Reims?”

— Kristin Harmel

116. “Her mother lived in a world of black and white, and Eva knew that neither of those colors existed, not really; it was all a spectrum of gray.”

— Kristin Harmel

117. “It was the war that kept us apart. The world went mad, and your grandfather was no more responsible for the outcome than I was, or than Rose was. We all made our choices. We all had to live with our regrets.”

— Kristin Harmel

118. “She had hunted animals. She had been hunted by animals. But the thought of humans hunting humans – it was difficult for her to understand, and it made her feel ill.”

— Kristin Harmel

119. “Would you have traded the life you’ve had with me for one with evil parents, just because it came with love?” “I don’t know,” Yona said. “You never gave me the chance to choose.”

— Kristin Harmel

120. “And though grief weighed her down – she couldn’t take a step without seeing Sister Maria Andrzeja’s empty eyes – she also felt lighter, untethered at last from a past that had always been an invisible weight. She was not Jerusza’s – she never had been, and she knew that now. But neither was she her German father’s. She belonged only to herself, a dove of the dark forest, the forest that called to her now.”

— Kristin Harmel

121. “It’s not the life I planned, but somehow, it’s the life I was intended to have. And now, finally, I’m ready to embrace it.”

— Kristin Harmel

122. “Libraries are very magical places.”

— Kristin Harmel

123. “Life is a series of opportunities, and you have to have the courage to seize them, before the years pass you by and leave you with nothing but regrets.”

— Kristin Harmel

124. “It’s never too late to find true love,” he says, locking eyes with me. “You just have to keep your heart open.”

— Kristin Harmel

125. “Remember: the planes cost a bloody fortune. You, on the other hand, are easily replaceable. Act accordingly.”

— Kristin Harmel

126. “People should always help others in need; there was no other way for the human race to survive.”

— Kristin Harmel

127. “Yes. But there is light, too. In the times of greatest darkness, the light always shines through, because there are people who stand up to do brave, decent things. What I am trying to say, Yona, is that in moments like this, it doesn’t matter what you were born to be. It matters what you choose to become.”

— Kristin Harmel

128. “You see, when you look back on things later in life, it’s sometimes easier to see the purpose. So perhaps for now, it’s best to try your hardest to focus on what lies ahead. The future is still something that can be changed, isn’t it?”

— Kristin Harmel

129. “Hope, you were born to do this,” he says with his mouth full, and although I know it’s a compliment, the words hit me hard, because I never intended to do this at all. It wasn’t the life I wanted for myself, and Matt knows it. But my grandmother got sick, my mother died, and I no longer had a choice.”

— Kristin Harmel

130. “Maybe in the end you can’t run from who you are without destroying your life.”

— Kristin Harmel

131. “Loss would forever be etched on the child like a tattoo; it might fade over time, but it would never be erased.”

— Kristin Harmel

132. “Now I think pain loses its power when we share it.”

— Kristin Harmel

133. “It is gentle and fierce, forgiving and demanding, and once it finds you, it lives in your heart forever.”

— Kristin Harmel

134. “Distraction wasn’t an impenatrable dam.”

— Kristin Harmel

135. “My mistake wasn’t in letting the marriage end; it was in fooling myself into believing that marrying him was a good idea in the first place.”

— Kristin Harmel

136. “Hope, you can’t go through life living by all the rules and doing what people expect of you without thinking for yourself, you know? That’s how you wake up at the age of eighty or whatever and realize life has passed you by.”

— Kristin Harmel

137. “That’s what books were for, after all. They were passageways to other worlds, other realities, other lives one could imagine living.”

— Kristin Harmel

138. “But considering the way so many records were lost or destroyed in the war, it shouldn’t be difficult to plant a few pieux mensonges, white lies.”

— Kristin Harmel

139. “She hadn’t realized that once one opened the door to one’s heart, it was impossible to fully close it again.”

— Kristin Harmel

140. “You can’t heal a heart that has been smashed to pieces; you can only move forward, doing your best to hold the shards together until they eventually form into something new.”

— Kristin Harmel

141. “Indeed. When it comes to books, the saucier, the better, don’t you think?”

— Kristin Harmel

142. “And to librarians and booksellers everywhere, who ensure that the books with the power to change lives find their way into the hands of the people who need them most.”

— Kristin Harmel

143. “It is not religion that divides man. It is good and evil here on earth that divides us.”

— Kristin Harmel

144. “But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since the start of the war, it’s that as long as we believe, we take our faith with us, whatever we do, wherever we go, if our motives are pure.”

— Kristin Harmel

145. “Please. I learned far too late that life is simply about being good and decent to others. It’s as plain as that. But first, you must be good and decent to yourself. Find.”

— Kristin Harmel

146. “For when you love, you stand to lose so much. But I think you stand to lose far more when your heart is closed. That is no life.”

— Kristin Harmel

147. “It’s the cracks in us that make us who we are, Zus had said, and perhaps he’d been right. When a linden tree broke, it often grew back, stronger and more beautiful in its damaged places. What if the same was true for man?”

— Kristin Harmel

148. “Where? Where did he go?” “East.” Eva took a deep breath. “To a work camp called Auschwitz. In Poland.” “But that’s impossible. He was taken less than a week ago. And we live in France, Eva. This doesn’t happen in France.” “I’m afraid it does.” Eva could see the crush of people penned up at Drancy each time she closed her eyes. “But we left Poland. We – we are French.” “We are Jews.”

— Kristin Harmel

149. “It is the feeling. You have to feel the things you paint in your soul, or they won’t come through to your paintbrush.”

— Kristin Harmel

150. “I know that now, in the world today, young people take freedom for granted. All the things you have, all of the freedoms you enjoy, they are things you were born with.”

— Kristin Harmel