Top 180 Kristin Harmel Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “For when you love, you stand to lose so much.”

— Kristin Harmel

154. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, there’s your rabbit-in-the-headlights look again.” He rolled his eyes, “Now, be a sport and hold my hand, will you? Your solider friend is coming back.”

— Kristin Harmel

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Kristin Harmel

162. “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

163. “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

164. “When you’re young, you see only the future. When you grow older, you see the past.” She turned to stare out the window. After a long pause, she spoke again, her voice quivering in a way Liv had never heard before. “And the past has a way of showing you things clearly, whether you like it or not.”

— Kristin Harmel

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

— Kristin Harmel

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

— Kristin Harmel

167. “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

168. “Most of our portfolio is brut or extra brut, which means that it contains less than twelve grams per liter of residual sugar, or less than a half teaspoon per five-ounce glass.”

— Kristin Harmel

169. “No. You’ll know it when I propose.” He held her gaze for a long time before breaking a grin.”

— Kristin Harmel

170. “Even if life transforms us, we are all who we are at our core, our whole lives through.”

— Kristin Harmel

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Kristin Harmel

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Kristin Harmel

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

— Kristin Harmel

179. “For it is only by loving, and having the courage to be loved in return, that you can find God, who exists most of all in.”

— Kristin Harmel

180. “In the spring, tattered and emaciated Jews who had spent the war in the concentration camps to the east had begun to return. Those who had lost family members peered into the faces of these walking skeletons, struggling to find the people they were so sure they’d never see again. Sometimes, there were joyous reunions. Mostly, though, the survivors returned to find that everyone they loved had perished and that their reward for enduring hell was a renewed sense of loss and despair.”

— Kristin Harmel

181. “Could they all be that evil? Or had they discovered a switch within themselves that allowed them to turn off their civility? Did they go home to their wives at night and simply flip the switches back on, become human once more?”

— Kristin Harmel

182. “Indeed, Yona has little experience with the way people were supposed to interact with each other. But, she know enough to know that when a man loved a woman, he didn’t do this. Not a good man, anyhow.”

— Kristin Harmel

183. “Maybe the lie wasn’t as wrong if it wasn’t uttered aloud.”

— Kristin Harmel