KRISTIN HANNAH

A romance novel focuses exclusively on two people falling in love. It can't be about a woman caring for her aging mother or something like that. It can have that element, but it has to be primarily about the male-female relationship.

The hallmark of my books is the relationships that define women's lives.

I can be a little OCD when it comes to my writing.

Whenever I write about motherhood - and I write about it a lot - I am drawing on my experiences as a mother and also my experiences as a daughter.

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.

I am such a Pacific Northwest girl.

Sitting around and waiting for your muse is not the best choice.

What I know now about life is this: your mother is a part of everything you do and everything you are.

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.

I know about forgiving people and loving them anyway, even after they hurt you.

You look great," he said. It made her smile, even if it was a lie. "I'm as big as a house." He laughed. "I like houses. In fact, I'm thinking about architecture as a career.

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.

She used to tell me that she couldn't feel the sunlight anymore, not even when she was standing in it, not even when it was hot on her cheeks

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.

It was true; always had been. Friendships were like marriages in that way. Routines and patterns were poured early and hardened like cement.

Real friends. The kind that don't purposely hurt your feelings or stop liking you for no reason.

Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that's a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I'll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.

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.

Goddamn, sometimes it hurt to be free.

In the sea of grief, there were islands of grace, moments in time when one could remember what was left rather than all that had been lost.

....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.

Then he left her there, standing alone, surrounded by word ghosts; things she could have said.

As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is the beating of my heart. I cannot now imagine a life without her.

From the first time we met, we knew everything that mattered about each other, didn't we? We just knew. I guess that's what best friends are: parts of each other.

The heat made people crazy. They woke from their damp bedsheets and went in search of a glass of water, surprised to find that when their vision cleared, they were holding instead the gun they kept hidden in the bookcase.