Kristin Hannah Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

Thoughts - even fears - were airy things, formless until you made them solid with your voice and once given that weight, they could crush you.

Kristin Hannah
We can't live other people's lives for them. Even if we love them.

Kristin Hannah
Honestly, I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is magical, complex, potentially dangerous, profoundly powerful, and deeply transformative. To put it simply, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all formed first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

Kristin Hannah
The at-home mother's life: it was a race with no finish line.

Kristin Hannah
He is a man, and he is afraid. This is not a good combination.

Kristin Hannah
I know about forgiving people and loving them anyway, even after they hurt you.

Kristin Hannah
We women make choices for others, not for ourselves, and when we are mothers, we...bear what we must for our children. You will protect them. It will hurt you; it will hurt them. Your job is to hide that your heart is breaking and do what they need you to do.

Kristin Hannah
It was true; always had been. Friendships were like marriages in that way. Routines and patterns were poured early and hardened like cement.

Kristin Hannah
Both had learned that everything could change in an instant, and that the heartfelt vows of people in love were fragile words that, once shattered, could cut so deeply you'd bleed forever.

Kristin Hannah
This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed. Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died—like parents and marriages—kept hurting forever.

Kristin Hannah
Of course you can fall in love. You just have to let yourself. They don't call it falling for nothing. -Kate

Kristin Hannah
At one point, she'd wanted to hurl the whole breakfast at the wall. And then she'd remember why it was that men had temper tantrums and women didn't: cleanup.

Kristin Hannah
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
Nothing was easier to shatter than the fragile shield of an idealist.

Kristin Hannah
Nina knew the power of black and white images. Sometimes a thing was its truest self when the colors were stripped away.

Kristin Hannah
The heat made people crazy. They woke from their damp bedsheets and went in search of a glass of water, surprised to find that when their vision cleared, they were holding instead the gun they kept hidden in the bookcase.

Kristin Hannah
You couldn't give up you for them. But what if you wanted them more than you wanted a singular powerful you?

Kristin Hannah
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
I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I'd like to be known.

Kristin Hannah
The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life.....Each decision seems as insignificant as a left turn on an unfamiliar road when you have no destination in mind. But the decisions accumulate until you realize one day that they've made you the man that you are.

Kristin Hannah
No mother. Two small words, and yet within them lay a bottomless well of pain and loss, a ceaseless mourning for touches that were never received and words of wisdom that were never spoken. No single word was big enough to adequately describe the loss of your mother.

Kristin Hannah
I'm an insomniac lately. It's one of the many prizes you find in the Cracker Jack box of a crumbling [relationship],

Kristin Hannah
You look great," he said. It made her smile, even if it was a lie. "I'm as big as a house." He laughed. "I like houses. In fact, I'm thinking about architecture as a career.

Kristin Hannah
Jude remembered this pain. Every woman had felt some version of it: the end of first love. It was when you learned, for good and always, that love could be impermanent.

Kristin Hannah
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