669 Quotes by Kristin Hannah

Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.

It was one of those moments – an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world – that changed a man’s life.

It’s not intentions that matter. It’s actions. My drill instructor used to say that all the time. We are what we do and say, not what we intend to. I.

Examination was the only solace. Instead of looking away from heartache, you needed to crawl inside of it, wear it like a warm coat on a cold day. There was peace in loss, beauty in death, freedom in regret.

But when he looked at her – and she looked at him – they both knew that there was something worse than kissing the wrong person. It was wanting to.

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.

The darkness seemed to be rising rather than the sun falling. As if darkness were the natural order around here.

She was wiser than she’d been before. Now she knew how fragile life and love were. Maybe she would love him for only this day, or maybe for only the next week, or maybe until she was an old, old woman. Maybe he would be the love of her life... or her love for the duration of this war... or maybe he would only be her first love. All she really knew was that in this terrible, frightening world, she had stumbled into something unexpected. And she would not let it go again.

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.