Kristina McMorris quotes:

On occasion, I like to reread my grandfather's letters. While leafing through them, I'm saddened by what is being lost in modern communication. Soul-baring sentimentality isn't typically poured into text messages, tweets and emails. All too often, personal connections are brushed aside for the sake of convenience in a fast-paced world.

My childhood memories of my grandparents are of a wonderful, complementary couple. While my grandfather had a spirited, humorous personality, my grandmother is gentle and poised.

Several years ago, I was creating a Christmas present for the family, a self-published cookbook featuring recipes my grandmother had collected and created over decades. While interviewing her for the biographical section, she began to talk about her courtship with my late grandfather.

Letters From Home' is a 90,000-word WWII love story with a twist, aptly summarized as 'The Notebook' meets 'Saving Private Ryan.'

People often refer to bygone days as a simpler time. Perhaps, more accurately, my grandparents' generation focused better on what mattered. Traffic jams and minor quibbles with my husband Daniel pale in comparison with the worries that were faced on the home front and battlefield during the Second World War.

Before the day my grandmother shared her treasured letters with me, I honestly wasn't much of a fiction reader, let alone creative writer.

The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.

'Letters From Home' is a story inspired by my grandparents' epistolary courtship.

Letters From Home' is a story inspired by my grandparents' epistolary courtship.

The most wonderful type of love, she had learned, was the kind built with care and over time, through forgiveness and understanding, compromise and compassion, trust and acceptance. It was hidden in the minutiae of every day life; it was in the traded smiles during a radio show or the peaceful lulls on an evening stroll.

Only thanks to blissful ignorance, and the inspiration of my grandparents' story, did I actually believe tackling a novel would be an easy task. I've since learned otherwise.

In seven days God had created the Earth. In a single day mankind had turned it upside down.

The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn't have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.

Maybe heaven entailed more than a soul residing in a single place, but instead having pieces of yourself spread among the hearts and memories of people you've touched.

Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.

Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.

Home. It's such a simple word, one I never knew would come to mean as much to me as it has. It once was my dad's house, then my uncle's farm. Mostly it's meant wherever Charlie and I were together. Now, though, it's you. It's your letters, your words. They're the place I go to with my fears, where I find comfort, where I feel safe.

Life is too short not to say how you feel to the people you love.

Were prayers of murderers, when fighting on the â??right sideâ? of the war, ever heardâ??let alone answered?