The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves. —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

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

He seemed to be growing before their eyes, like a tree, spreading branches wide, becoming strong.

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

I think it was Jack London who said there were a thousand ways to die in Alaska.

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

A beautiful truth about true friendship.

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

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.

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

“You can’t be Alaskan and be afraid of small planes. This is how we get around.”

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

“You know what walls do?” Large Marge said. “They hide what happens behind them. They trap people inside.”

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

“Were you ever out in the Great Alone when the moon was awful clear…”

Tears, tears, and more tears!

And maybe all that black was a shield, a way to say to people: Don’t talk to me, don’t approach me, don’t ask your ordinary, everyday questions when my world has exploded.

He’d been drowning for all of these years without her, and she was the shore he’d been flailing to find.

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

Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl.

Alaska didn’t create character; it revealed it.

In the vast expanse of this unpredictable wilderness, you will either become your best self and flourish, or you will run away, screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in the Great Alone.

In the end, we all care about the same things and we are stronger together. That message is pretty strong in The Great Alone.