The Four Winds

by Kristin Hannah

There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown. Elsa had survived it by being quiet, by not demanding or seeking attention, by accepting that she was loved, but unliked.

He’d been the only Wolcott besides Elsa who loved reading, and he’d frequently taken her side in family disagreements. Don’t worry about dying, Elsa. Worry about not living. Be brave.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.… The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

Although she hadn’t seen her parents for years, it turned out that a parent’s disapproval was a powerful, lingering voice that shaped and defined one’s self-image.

There was something she hadn’t known when she went into marriage and became a mother that she knew now: it was only possible to live without love when you’d never known it.

Apparently you couldn’t stop loving some people, or needing their love, even when you knew better.

Poverty was a soul-crushing thing. A cave that tightened around you, its pinprick of light closing a little more at the end of each desperate, unchanged day.

It wasn’t the fear that mattered in life. It was the choices made when you were afraid. You were brave because of your fear, not in spite of it. “Yes.”

Love is what remains when everything else is gone. This is what I should have told my children when we left Texas. What I will tell them tonight. Not that they will understand yet. How could they? I am forty years old, and I only just learned this fundamental truth myself. Love. In the best of times, it is a dream. In the worst of times, a salvation.

warrior believes in an end she can’t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself. It sounds like motherhood to me.