The Great Alone Quotes

“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“A thing can be true and not the truth,”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“A girl was like a kite; without her mother's strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I .... forget ?
Mama sighed.
Ah. That. Love doesn't fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn't. If you love him now, you'll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe , a faded version, but he's part of you now. And you are part of him.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Love and fear. The most destructive forces on earth. Fear had turned her inside out, love had made her stupid.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“... home was not just a cabin in a deep woods that overlooked a placid cove. Home was a state of mind, the peace that came from being who you were and living an honest life.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“In the silence, Leni wondered if one person could ever really save another, or if it was the kind of thing you had to do for yourself.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“You have a child, so you know. You are my heart, baby girl. You are everything I did right. And I want you to know I would do it all again, every wonderful terrible second of it. I would do years and years of it again for one minute with you.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Leni had never known anyone who had died before. She had seen death on television and read about it in her beloved books, but now she saw the truth of it. In literature, death was many things - a message, catharsis, retribution. There were deaths that came from a beating heart that stopped and deaths of another kind, a choice made, like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should.

In real life, she saw, it wasn't like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Alaska isn't about who you were when you headed this way. It's about who you become.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“It’s scary that people can just stop loving you, you know?”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“You don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“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.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“I think you stand by the people you love.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“life—and the law—is hard on women. Sometimes doing the right thing is no help at all.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst?”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Instinctively, she lifted her camera and minimized her view of the world. It was how she managed her memories, how she processed the world. In pictures. With a camera, she could crop and reframe her life.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Like all motherless girls, Leni would become an emotional explorer, trying to uncover the lost part of her, the mother who carried and nurtured and loved her. Leni would become both mother and child; to her, mama would still grow and age. She would never be gone, not as long as Leni remembered her.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place. I read about places I can barely imagine and lose myself in journeys to foreign lands to save girls who didn’t know they were really princesses.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“She knew what nightmares could do to a person and how bad memories could change who you were.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“And the books! She’d never seen so many. They whispered to her of unexplored worlds and unmet friends and she realized that she wasn’t alone in this new world. Her friends were here, spine out, waiting for her as they always had.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“She saw how love could be dangerous and beyond control. Ravenous.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Now she knew there were a hundred ways to be lost and even more ways to be found.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Everyone up here had two stories : the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any Life that could be imagined could be lived up here.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“She knew the difference between fact and fiction, but she couldn’t abandon her love stories.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone