Kristin Hannah 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.

A thing can be true and not the truth,

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.

You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.

Love and fear. The most destructive forces on earth. Fear had turned her inside out, love had made her stupid.

... 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.

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.

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.

You don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you.

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.

Alaska isn't about who you were when you headed this way. It's about who you become.

It’s scary that people can just stop loving you, you know?

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.

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.

I think you stand by the people you love.

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?

life—and the law—is hard on women. Sometimes doing the right thing is no help at all.

like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

Now she knew there were a hundred ways to be lost and even more ways to be found.

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.

She knew what nightmares could do to a person and how bad memories could change who you were.

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?

They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.

She saw how love could be dangerous and beyond control. Ravenous.

Alaska didn’t create character; it revealed it.

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.

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.

She knew the difference between fact and fiction, but she couldn’t abandon her love stories.

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.

Leni felt distance spreading between them. That was how change came, she supposed: in the quiet of things unspoken and truths unacknowledged.

The glass can be half empty or half full.” Leni knew the glass was broken.

All at once, it seemed, the leaves of cottonwood trees around the cabin turned golden and whispered to themselves, then curled into black flutes and floated to the ground in crispy, lacy heaps.

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.

Fear, Leni learned, was not the small dark closet she'd always imagined; walls pressed in close, a ceiling you bumped your head on, a floor cold to the touch. No. Fear was a mansion, one room after another, connected by endless hallways.

I’m so lucky to have you, Leni,” Mama said, trying to organize her cards with one hand. “We’re a team,” Leni said. “Peas in a pod.” “Two of a kind.” Words they said all the time to each other; words that felt a little hollow now. Maybe even sad.

In time, his grief had turned to anger and then drifted toward sorrow, and now, finally, it had settled into a lingering sadness that was a part of him, not the whole.

SUCH A THIN VEIL separated the past from the present; they existed simultaneously in the human heart.

You know what I love most about you, Leni Allbright?" "What?" "Everything.

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

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.

Mama had quit high school and “lived on love.” That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

Samwise Gamgee would never leave Frodo like this. No hero would ever do this. But books were only a reflection of real life, not the thing itself.

Fear and shame she understood. Fear made you run and hide and shame made you stay quiet, but this anger wanted something else. Release.

Mama could never leave Dad, and Leni would never leave Mama. And Dad could never let them go. In this toxic knot that was their family, there was no escape for any of them.

A searing, cleansing, enveloping love blew her heart into a million tiny pieces and reshaped it.

You know what the say about finding a man in Alaska - the odds are good, but the goods are odd." - The Great Alone

It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.

She needed Matthew, but not to save her or complete her or reinvent her. Her love for him was the clearest, cleanest, strongest emotion she’d ever felt. It was like opening your eyes or growing up, realizing that you had it in you to love like this. Forever. For all time. Or for all the time you had.

Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.

If he loved you guys, he wouldn’t hurt you.” He made it sound so simple, as if it were a mathematical equation. But the connection between pain and love wasn’t linear. It was a web.

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? Was it better not to hope at all, to prepare? Wasn’t that what her father’s lesson always was? Prepare for the worst.

Mama gave a tired laugh. Leni understood. You could be as careful as a chemist with nitroglycerin around dad. It wouldn't change a thing. Sooner or later, he was going to blow.

Alone is overrated," he said simply.

She found herself secretly mapping his face, memorizing every ridge and hollow and valley, as if she were an explorer and he her discovery.

The world could tumble, change radically in two days, with just one less person living in it.

Hope. A shiny thing, a lure for the unwary. She knew how seductive it could be, and how dangerous.

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.

I love you," he said quietly. "I love you, too." The word felt too small, too ordinary to contain all of this emotion.

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.

A thing can be true and not the truth, now shush.

In Alaska you can make one mistake. One. The second one will kill you.

Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next.

Yeah. Well. The glass can be half empty or half full." Leni knew the glass was broken.

Leni was pretty sure that, to her, childhood would always smell like sea air and cigarette smoke and her mother’s rose-scented perfume.

Leni was afraid to stay and afraid to leave. It was strange—stupid, even—but she often felt like the only adult in her family, as if she were the ballast that kept the creaky Allbright boat on an even keel.

Leni stared down at the sea, rolling inexorably toward her. Nothing you did could hold back that rising tide. One mistake or miscalculation and you could be stranded or washed away. All you could do was protect yourself by reading the charts and being prepared and making smart choices.

Alaska was full of fringe-ists. People who believed in weirdo things and prayed to exclusionary Gods and filled their basements with equal measures of guns and Bibles. If you wanted to live in a place where no one told you what to do and didn’t care if you parked a trailer in your yard or had a fridge on your porch, Alaska was the state for you.

Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

And you,” Large Marge said. “What’s your story, missy?” “I don’t have a story.” “Everyone has a story. Maybe yours just starts up here.

He also knew that love could freeze over, become a kind of thin ice all its own.

The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska.

He wanted to tell her that when he painted, he felt her, remembered her, that it had started in rehab as occupational therapy and now it was his passion.

Night swept in like nothing Leni had ever seen before, like the winged shadow of a creature too big and predatory to comprehend.

But the connection between pain and love wasn’t linear. It was a web.

In literature, death was many things—a message, catharsis, retribution

Leni heard her mother start to cry, and somehow that made it worse, as if her tears watered this ugliness, made it grow.

we try to knit our lives together, dropped stitches and all. Maybe that’s what love is.

Fear was a mansion, one room after another, connected by endless hallways.

What is, is, and what isn’t, isn’t.

you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.

She thought about the chain of choices that had led her here. A ten-degree shift anywhere along the way and everything would be different.

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.

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? Was it better not to hope at all, to prepare?

Her love for him was the clearest, cleanest, strongest emotion she’d ever felt. It was like opening your eyes or growing up, realizing that you had it in you to love like this. Forever. For all time. Or for all the time you had.

It was otherworldly somehow, magical in its vast expanse, an incomparable landscape of soaring glacier-filled white mountains that ran the length of the horizon, knife-tip points pressed high into a cloudless cornflower-blue sky.

Like all motherless girls, Leni would become an emotional explorer, trying to uncover the lost part of her, the mother who had carried and nurtured and loved her. Leni would become both mother and child; through her, Mama would still grow and age. She would never be gone, not as long as Leni remembered her.

In real life, she saw, it wasn’t like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world. It made her think about God and what He offered at times like this. She wondered for the first time what her parents believed in, what she believed in, and she saw how the idea of Heaven could be comforting. She could hardly imagine a thing as terrible as losing your mother. The very thought of it made Leni sick to her stomach. 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.

Will ya look at it?” Dad threw his arms wide, as if he wanted to embrace it all. He seemed to be growing before their eyes, like a tree, spreading branches wide, becoming strong. He liked the nothingness he saw, the vast emptiness. It was what he’d come for.

Inside was a library unlike any Leni had ever seen. Row upon row of wooden desks, decorated with green banker's lamps, were positioned beneath an arched ceiling. Gothic chandeliers hung above the desks. 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.

Leni knew it was crazy, but it seemed to her as if they were having a conversation without saying anything, talking about books and durable friendships and overcoming insurmountable odds. Maybe they weren’t talking about Sam and Frodo at all, maybe they were talking about themselves and how they had somehow grown up and stayed kids at the same time.

Leni stared down at her father. She saw the man who had used his fists when he was angry, saw the blood on his hands and the mean set to his jaw. But she saw the other man, too, the one she’d crafted from photographs and her own need, the one who’d loved them as much as he could, his capacity for love destroyed by war. Leni thought maybe that he would haunt her. Not just him, but the idea of him, the sad and scary truth that you could love and hate the same person at the same time, that you could feel a deep and abiding loss and shame for your own weakness and still be glad that this awful thing had been done.

Wild. That’s how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it’s all the same to me. Alaska doesn’t attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.

They were kids, she and Matthew; no one asked their opinion or told them anything. They just had to muddle along and live in the world presented to them, confused a lot of the time because nothing made sense, but certain of their subterranean place on the food chain.

She could leave them. She could break free and go her own way. It would be frightening, but it couldn’t be worse than staying, watching this toxic dance of theirs, letting their world become her world until there was nothing left of her at all, until she was as small as a comma.

Leni felt the sudden fragility of her world, of the world itself. She barely remembered Before. Maybe she didn't remember it at all, in fact. Maybe the images she did have-Dad lifting her onto his shoulders, pulling petals from a daisy, holding a buttercup to her chin, reading her a bedtime story-maybe these were all images she'd taken from pictures and imbued with an imagined life.

In that one image, Matthew saw the whole of his life; past, present, and future. It was one of those moments—an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world—that changed a man’s life.

Leni shook her head, feeling a familiar sadness creep in. She could never tell him how it felt to live with a dad who scared you sometimes and a mother who loved him too much and make him prove how much he loved her in dangerous ways. Like flirting. These were Leni's secrets. Her burdens. She couldn't share them. All this time, all these years, she'd dreamed of having a real friend, one who would tell her everything. How had she missed the obvious? Leni couldn't have a real friend because she couldn't be one.

Alaska brings out the best and the worst in a man. Maybe if you'd stayed Outside you never would have become who you are now. I know about 'Nam, and it breaks my heart what you boys went through. But you can't handle the dark, can you? It's nothing to be ashamed of. Most folks can't. Accept it and do what's best for your family.

I was taught by my father to be afraid of the world, and some of the lessons stuck. I read about Patty Hearst and the Zodiac Killer and the massacre at the Munich Olympics and Charles Manson, and I knew the world was a terrifying place. He said it all of the time, reminded me that mountains could blow up and kill people in their sleep. Governments were corrupt. A flu could come out of nowhere and kill millions. A nuclear bomb could fall at any second, obliterating everything.

Winter tightened its grip on Alaska. The vastness of the landscape dwindled down to the confines of their cabin. The sun rose at quarter past ten in the morning and set only fifteen minutes after the end of the school day. Less than six hours of light a day. Snow fell endlessly, blanketed everything. It piled up in drifts and spun its lace across windowpanes, leaving them nothing to see except themselves. In the few daylight hours, the sky stretched gray overhead; some days there was merely the memory of light rather than any real glow. Wind scoured the landscape, cried out as if in pain. The fireweed froze, turned into intricate ice sculptures that stuck up from the snow. In the freezing cold, everything stuck -- car doors froze, windows cracked, engines refused to start. The ham radio filled with warnings of bad weather and listed the deaths that were as common in Alaska in the winter as frozen eyelashes. People died for the smallest mistake -- car keys dropped in a river, a gas tank gone dry, a snow machine breaking down, a turn taken too fast. Leni couldn't go anywhere or do anything without a warning. Already the winter seemed to have gone on forever. Shore ice seized the coastline, glazed the shells and stones until the beach looked like a silver-sequined collar. Wind roared across the homestead, as it had all winter, transforming the white landscape with every breath. Trees cowered in the face of it, animals built dens and burrowed in holes and went into hiding. Not so different from the humans, who hunkered down in this cold, took special care.