Kristin Hannah

That was the one thing she knew now. Some chances came and went, and if you missed them, you could spend the rest of your life standing alone, waiting for an opportunity that had already passed you by.

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.

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.

The next morning, Angie woke with the sun...Her eyes felt gritty and swollen.Once again she'd watered her mattress with memories.

Sometimes you simply made the wrong choice and you had to live with it. You could only change the future.

It isn__ about being at the same school or the same town or even the same room. It__ about being together. Love is a choice you make.

Love. It was the beginning and end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between.

. . .you sounded frustrated and pissed off and amazingly happy

He'd learned in the past few months that telling a girl what to wear--even one the size of a golf club--was a bad idea. Histrionics often followed.

Was Vianne really supposed to let Sophie starve to prove her loyalty to France?

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?

It is a kiss that, once begun, never really ends. Interrupted, yes. Paused, certainly. But from that very moment onward, Vera sees the whole of her life as only a breath away from kissing him again. On that night in the park, they begin the delicate task of binding their souls together, creating a whole comprising their separate halves.

Memories are who we are, Tul. In the end, that__ all the luggage you take with you. Love and memories are what last.

Those are exactly the kind of memories I try to avoid, but they're like abestos: invisible and deadly. You need special gear to get rid of them.

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.