Kristin Hannah
Alice started to cry. It came with no sound, no shuddering, no childlike hysterics, just a soul-deep release that turned into moisture and dripped down her puffy pink cheeks. She touched her tears, frowning. Then she looked up at Julia and whimpered two words before she fell asleep. ‘Real hurts.’Collection: Hurt
He was afraid that the secrets she'd kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would--for one heartbeat--flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red.Collection: Heart
Promises were a lot like impressions. The second one didn't count for much.Collection: Promise
Liam learned that it was possible to appear to move forward when you were really standing still.Collection: Moving
It was the Magic Hour, the moment in time when every leaf and blade of grass seemed to separate, when sunlight, burnished by the rain and softened by the coming night, gave the world an impossibly beautiful glow.Collection: Beautiful
When you get . . . to the end, you see that love and family are all there is. Nothing else matters.Collection: Matter
I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I'd like to be known.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Pain
Marriages go through hard times. Sometimes you have to get in there and fight for your love. That's the only way for it to get better.Collection: Love
It’s a promise ring,” he said solemnly. “The lady at the store said it’s what you give the girl you love. It means I want to marry you someday.Collection: Girl
And no one drank just one shot of tequila.Collection: Tequila
To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost.Collection: Gone
Sometimes being a good friend means saying nothing.Collection: Mean
Girls like you can't understand," Julia said, and it was true. Ellie had been popular. She didn't know that some hurts were like a once-broken bone. In the right weather, they could ache for a lifetime.Collection: Girl
what shall we drink to?" "How about family?" Stacy said, showing up just in time to pour a fourth shot. "To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost." and she clicked glasses with momCollection: Mom
It isn’t about being at the same school or the same town or even the same room. It’s about being together. Love is a choice you make.Collection: Love
Books + friendship = book clubCollection: Book
The falling apart of a man's life should make more noise. It should startle passesrby with its Sturm and Drang. It ought to sound like the Parthenon crashing down. Not this ordinary, everyday kind of quiet...He closed his eyes...And still it was quiet, this falling apart of his life, as silent as the last beat of an old man's heart. A quiet, echoing thud, and then...nothing.Collection: Fall
What good did it do to light the world on fire if she had to watch the glow alone?Collection: Fire
I didn't know how...deep love ran, how it was in your blood, not your heart, and how that same blood pumped through your veins your whole life.Collection: Heart
She waited for you in a thousand different ways.Collection: Different
Of course you can fall in love. You just have to let yourself. They don't call it falling for nothing. -KateCollection: Falling In Love
It's not a date. I bought my own drink and I didn't shave my legs.Collection: Legs
It had been years since she question his fidelity, but he'd stepped on to the old fame track again, and that was where the road had taken them before. Infidelity could be forgiven, but forgetting it was impossible. Strangely, that wasn't what bothered her the most. What bothered her was that she didn't really care.Collection: Taken
This is the problem with forever friends. They know too much.Collection: Forever
We women. as glue for the family. lead lives that are important and conflicted. What we women choose to give up for our families is important and valid.Collection: Giving Up
Fifteen minutes later, Betsy came thundering down the stairs. "I'm going to the mall with Sierra to see a movie." Michael leaned forward, switched off the television. "Can you please rephrase that in the form of a question?" "Sure. Can I have some money?Collection: Television
I prefer to scare myself in the ordinary ways, Daddy. Like letting my children cross the country for college. Why bungee jump when you can put a kindergartener on a school bus? Now, that's real terror.Collection: Country
The measure of a society is its compassion.Collection: Compassion
Honestly, when you start talking about genres, you're talking as much about the business side of writing as anything else. Certainly there are elements of reader expectation that play into various genres, and those are important, but it also becomes about packaging, placement, audience....In the end, I'm not a fan of labels. I think the best fiction blurs the boundaries between genres, stretches and breaks them.Collection: Writing
She still felt shell-shocked by all of it, numb. Beneath the numbness, though, was a raw and terrible anger that was unlike anything she'd felt before. She had so little experience with genuine anger that it scared her. She actually worried that if she started screaming, she'd never stop.Collection: Numbness
Time goes too quickly. This is the advice that my mother should have given me from her hospital bed. Instead of vague, unknowable quips like "Be careful what you wish for," she should have told me time slides away on a hillside of loose shale and takes everything in its path - dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all.Collection: Mother
....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.Collection: Cutting
And before you barrel through some idiotic Cosmo girl list of how-well-do-you-know-your-man questions, let me say that I don't know squat about him except that he kisses like a god and screws like a devil.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Mother
She had been ready to love this man from the moment she first saw him. In all these years, that had never changed. They'd hurt each other, let each other down, and yet, here they were after everything, together. She needed him now, needed him to remind her that she was live, that she wasn't alone, that she hadn't lost everything.Collection: Hurt
That was the thing about best friends. Like sisters and mothers, they could piss you off and make you cry and break your heart, but in the end, when the chips were down, they were there, making you laugh even in your darkest hours.Collection: Best Friend
One thing I can tell you for sure is this: we only regret what we don't do in life.Collection: Regret
We can't live other people's lives for them. Even if we love them.Collection: People
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.Collection: Pain
You will always miss her. There will be days - even years from now - when the missing will be so sharp it will take your breath away. But there will be good days, too, months and years of them. In one way or another you'll be searching for her all your life.Collection: Good Day
To make real friends you have to put yourself out there. Sometimes people will let you down, but you can't let that stop you. If you get hurt, you just pick yourself up, dust off your feelings, and try again.Collection: Hurt
To lose love is a terrible thing. But to turn away from it is unbearable. Will you spend the rest of your life replaying it in your head? Wondering if you walked away too soon or too easily? Or if you'll ever love anyone that deeply again?Collection: Love Is
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.Collection: Mother
They would always be a family, but if she'd learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn't a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn't control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.Collection: Past
Then he left her there, standing alone, surrounded by word ghosts; things she could have said.Collection: Ghost
It occurred to her suddenly, sharply, that she wanted to be in love... She wanted not to feel so damned alone in the world.Collection: World
Nobody's strong enough to be a parent. We just do it, blindly, going forward on faith and love and hope. That's all it is...Being afraid...and going on.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Wall