Top 180 Kristin Harmel Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 4

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

— Kristin Harmel

102. “Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.’ This is our country, my dear, and I will fight for its honor to the end.”

— Kristin Harmel

103. “But if we shrink from them, if we lose our goodness, we let them erase us. We cannot do that, Eva. We cannot.”

— Kristin Harmel

104. “But when you grow comfortable hiding within a protective shell, it’s harder than one might expect to stand up and say, “Actually, folks, this is who I am.”

— Kristin Harmel

105. “By the grace of God, may we all be vanishing stars.”

— Kristin Harmel

106. “Later that night, after Mamusia had gone to sleep, Tatus found Eva in the small library off the parlor, shelves piled high with all the books the two of them treasured so much. He had taught her to love reading, one of the greatest gifts a parent could give a child, and in doing so, he had opened the world to her.”

— Kristin Harmel

107. “She doesn’t understand what it means to love books so passionately that you would die without them, that you would simply stop breathing, stop existing.”

— Kristin Harmel

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “It is mankind that creates the differences, she’d told me last week. That does not mean it is not all the same God.”

— Kristin Harmel

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “Libraries are very magical places.”

— Kristin Harmel

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

— Kristin Harmel

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Kristin Harmel

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

— Kristin Harmel

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

— Kristin Harmel

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

— Kristin Harmel

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

— Kristin Harmel

126. “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

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

— Kristin Harmel

128. “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

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

— Kristin Harmel

130. “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

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

— Kristin Harmel

132. “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

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

— Kristin Harmel

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “The thing is, not every happily ever after needs to end with a Prince Charming,” I say after a pause. “I already had my prince, and if there’s another one out there, great. But I’m not sitting around waiting to get rescued. It’s time that I’m the one doing the saving.”

— Kristin Harmel

140. “As soon as I close the door behind him, I reach for the phone and call the main number for Delta. Ten minutes later, I’m rebooked on the 3:11 flight today, leaving six hours earlier and arriving in Berlin at 10:50 tomorrow morning after a connection in New York. I didn’t exactly lie to Ben, I reassure myself. I am changing my flight, just like I said.”

— Kristin Harmel

141. “But God believes in you, my dear,” Sister Maria Andrzeja replied immediately. She looked up and held Yona’s gaze. “And that makes us all the same, all over the world.”

— Kristin Harmel

142. “She wished she could grab the memories like lifelines and hold on before she went under. But she found them slippery, impossible to grasp.”

— Kristin Harmel

143. “We all suffer losses. But it is how we choose to move ahead that matters, isn’t it? We must honor the past without turning our backs on the future.”

— Kristin Harmel

144. “I don’t know much about these things. But I think that broken hearts heal. I think that perhaps the only way through that kind of pain is to move forward. I think that losing people you love changes you forever, but I think that God finds a way to let the light in.”

— Kristin Harmel

145. “Ben has never really known me. He knew the pieces I chose to give to him, the body that nursed him, the voice that scolded him, the hands that soothed him. But there is so much more to me, pieces that had nothing to do with my role as his mother, pieces I never let him see.”

— Kristin Harmel

146. “I knew on some level that he was right, but my anger toward my dad was like a badge of honor, something that united my mom and me. Letting it go would be like losing a piece of who I was.”

— Kristin Harmel

147. “It’s you,” he said softly when finally he was at her side. “It’s you,” she breathed, and then his lips were on hers, and he was kissing her in a way that made her forget the world around them for a few precious seconds.”

— Kristin Harmel

148. “Home is not a place but the people you choose to love.”

— Kristin Harmel

149. “Once you discover that you can make magic with a brush, painting becomes like breathing. You can’t live without.”

— Kristin Harmel

150. “Because, my dear, it is good to remember that you do not always have to see something to know that it is there.”

— Kristin Harmel