Top 100 Paula McLain Quotes
#1. he grinned a grin that began in his eyes and went everywhere at once. It was devastating.
Paula McLain
#2. Did you ever think it could be like this? The way we're happening to each other?
Paula McLain
#3. I get why no one bothers with the usual rules," ... "I was in the war, too, you know. Nothing looks or feels the same anymore, so what's the point?" ... "Still, I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else.
Paula McLain
#4. and was there for the birth, on 25 February
Paula McLain
#5. I never thought I'd get married," I told Boy as he poured for us. Scotch spilled into the squat glasses with reassuring lapping noises. "I should have left well enough alone." "You don't need to explain.
Paula McLain
#6. A week passes but it feels as if he's never been anywhere else. It's one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can't remember why any of it mattered. It doesn't help if you're a soldier. The effect is the same.
Paula McLain
#7. Don't be difficult, Denys," Nell chided. "All women like a little flattery from time to time." "What if they didn't? What if they simply liked themselves and no one needed to bend backwards to flatter them? Wouldn't it all be simpler then?
Paula McLain
#8. We stood there, locked and lovely as statues in a garden.
Paula McLain
#9. People belong together to each other only as long as they believe. He stopped believing.
Paula McLain
#10. They'd scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own terms - not just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating.
Paula McLain
#11. I've never travelled," I told her. "Oh, you absolutely should," she insisted, "if only so that you can come home and really see it for what it is. That's my favourite part.
Paula McLain
#12. We'd given up trying to fool anyone, even ourselves.
Paula McLain
#13. Only the day before, Cockie's dark joke wouldn't have included me, but now it did. "Is love always such a mess, do you suppose?
Paula McLain
#14. All her stories seemed to involve rowboats and ukuleles, full moons and campfires and grog. I was desperately jealous.
Paula McLain
#15. Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.
Paula McLain
#16. I met the devil,' Ernest said, finishing his glass of wine, 'and he doesn't give a damn about art.
Paula McLain
#17. The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same,
Paula McLain
#18. But in the end, fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.
Paula McLain
#19. How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in.
Paula McLain
#20. There was nowhere to go in the house to escape my dark thoughts.
Paula McLain
#21. Are you always this wise, Ruth?"
"Only when it comes to other people's lives.
Paula McLain
#22. I felt a sense of anticipation of being on the verge of something interesting.
Paula McLain
#23. They had as good a shot at making it as anyone did, but what if marriage didn't solve anything and didn't save anyone even a little bit? What then?
Paula McLain
#24. Denys understood how nothing ever holds still for us, or should. The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistance or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend.
Paula McLain
#25. The things of the world knew so much more than we did and lived them more truly. The thorn trees had no grief or fear. The constellations didn't fight or hold themselves back, nor did the translucent hook of the moon. Everything was momentary and endless.
Paula McLain
#26. When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked.
Paula McLain
#27. Walk through your sorrow, my daughter, it hardly matters as long as you walk to where you want to be.
Paula McLain
#28. Searching out something important and going astray look exactly the same for a while, in fact.
Paula McLain
#29. He didn't know how love managed to be a garden one moment and war the next. He was at war now, his loyalty tested at every turn.
Paula McLain
#30. It was august. for years it was august ... . there was heat like wet gauze and a high, white sky and music coming from everywhere at once.
Paula McLain
#31. I knew that I could hate him all I wanted for the way he was hurting me, but I couldn't ever stop loving him, absolutely, for what he was.
Paula McLain
#32. The worst events always have the thrust of accidents, as if they come out of nowhere. But that's just lack of perspective.
Paula McLain
#33. It struck me how comfortable I felt with him, as if we were old friends or had already done this many times over, him handing me pages with his heart on his sleeve - he couldn't pretend this work didn't mean everything to him - me reading his words, quietly amazed by what he could do.
Paula McLain
#34. I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else. I know that makes me a sap.
Paula McLain
#35. They sat in the cafes with their fresh faces and long lovely legs and waited for something outrageous to happen.
Paula McLain
#36. You're making something new. Don't forget that when it starts to hurt.
Paula McLain
#37. People interest me so much. They're such wonderful puzzles. Think of it. Half the time we've no idea what we're doing, but we live anyway.
Paula McLain
#38. Maybe that's the secret to surviving all sorts of trouble, knowing who you are apart from it, I mean.
Paula McLain
#39. Her absence was still so loud and so heavy, I ached with it, feeling hollow and lost. I didn't know how to forget my mother any more than my father knew how he might comfort me.
Paula McLain
#41. Sometimes when you're hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight.
Paula McLain
#42. Things come that we never would have predicted for ourselves or even guessed at. And yet they change us for ever.
Paula McLain
#43. It's important to test your nerve occasionally,' she said. 'It keeps you young.
Paula McLain
#44. You make your life with someone and you love that person and you think it's enough. But it's never enough, is it?
I couldn't say. I don't know anything about love anymore.
Paula McLain
#45. I had come alive here ... this was my home, and though one day it would all trickle through my fingers like so much red dust, for as long as childhood lasted it was a heaven fitted exactly to me. A place I knew by heart. The one place in the world I'd been made for.
Paula McLain
#47. He stared into his coffee, thinking quietly. "But you've never been afraid of anything, have you?"
"I have, though," I said, surprised at my own emotion. "I've been terrified... I just haven't let it stop me
Paula McLain
#48. The first time I saw a narcissus pushing through ice and thriving, I thought it was perfect and wanted that kind of determination for myself.
Paula McLain
#49. He'd left me for a time. He'd doubted me, but now he was mine again and I wanted to keep him here in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets until I'd quieted every last voice and we were only right again.
Paula McLain
#50. He had writing the way other people had religion
Paula McLain
#51. I'd never met anyone so vibrant or alive. He moved like light.
Paula McLain
#52. Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.
Paula McLain
#53. He pulled me into the room and way lay on the featherbed and made love. And I was reminded of what was best about us.
How very easy and natural we could be as bodies, with no sharp angles or missteps and no need for talking.
How in bed, as nowhere else, he was my favorite animal and I was his.
Paula McLain
#54. How close people could be to us when they had gone as far away as possible, to the edges of the map. How unforgettable.
Paula McLain
#55. And after a time, I stopped struggling even internally against the prescribed quietness.
Paula McLain
#56. He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, the tip flaring an angry red. Isn't love a beautiful goddamn liar?
Paula McLain
#57. I also liked to look around at the houses surrounding the park and wonder about the people who filled them, what kinds of marriages they had and how they loved or hurt each other on any given day, and if they were happy, and whether they thought happiness was a sustainable thing.
Paula McLain
#58. I had forged her myself, out of brokenness, learning to love wildness instead of fearing it. To thrive on the exhilaration of the hunt, charging headlong into the world even when it hurt to do it.
Paula McLain
#59. I close my eyes an lean into Ernest, smelling bourbon and soap, tobacco and damp cotton - and everything about this moment is so sharp and lovely, I do something completely out of character and just let myself have it.
Paula McLain
#60. He would eat me here or drag me off to a glade or valley only he knew of, a place from which I'd never return. The last thought I remember having was This is how it feels, then. This is what it means to be eaten by a lion.
Paula McLain
#61. Sometimes I've thought it's only our challenges that sharpen us, and change us, too - a mile-long runway and nineteen hundred pounds
Paula McLain
#62. A new thing is good, though it be a sore place.
Paula McLain
#63. I loved him for a full year and then, in one night, all my wishing came apart.
Paula McLain
#64. I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.
Paula McLain
#65. It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever.
Paula McLain
#66. I like to think I'm the kind of girl who'll drink anything," I said, " but maybe not from a shoe.
Paula McLain
#67. Knowing he was suffering pained me. That's the way love tangles you up. I couldn't stop loving him, and couldn't shut off the feelings of wanting to care for him - but I also didn't have to run to answer his letters. I was hurting, too, and no one was running to me.
Paula McLain
#68. It was our favorite part of the day, this in-between time, and it always seemed to last longer than it should
a magic and lavender space unpinned from the hours around it, between worlds.
Paula McLain
#69. Twende tu, she called out in Swahili as she buckled her helmet. I am going.
Paula McLain
#70. It was terrible to feel so empty, as if I were nothing. Why couldn't I be happy? And just what was happines anyway?
Paula McLain
#71. I couldn't understand why Frank would want to spend time with this crowd. They were bored, naughty children with highballs and morphine and sex for their toys. People were toys, too.
Paula McLain
#72. More and more I find myself at a loss for words and didn't want to hear other people talking either. Their conversations seemed false and empty. I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.
Paula McLain
#73. There are things I didn't see before, like how nice it is to have someone around. Not the white knight whisking you away, but the fellow who sits at your table every night and tells you what he is thinking.
Paula McLain
#74. There are things we find only at our lowest depths. The idea of wings and then wings themselves. An ocean worth crossing one dark mile at a time. The whole of the sky.
Paula McLain
#75. And that's when he finally tells me his name is Ernest. I'm thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?
Paula McLain
#76. I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.
Paula McLain
#77. What am I meant for then?" "How wonderful that question is, Beru." He smiled mysteriously. "And as you did not die on this day, you have more time in which to answer it.
Paula McLain
#78. On December 8, 1921, when the Leopoldina set sail for Europe, we were on board. Our life together had finally begun. We held on to each other and looked out at the sea. It was impossibly large and full of beauty and danger in equal parts-and we wanted it all.
Paula McLain
#79. Oh." It seemed I'd surprised him. "There isn't a lot of that kind of thinking around here."
"Of course there is," I told him, trying to draw a smile. "It's just usually a man who's doing it.
Paula McLain
#80. But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.
Paula McLain
#81. This is why there is poetry. For days like these.
Paula McLain
#82. There was only today to throw yourself into without thinking about tomorrow, let alone forever. To keep you from thinking, there was liquor, an ocean's worth at least, all the usual vices and plenty of rope to hang yourself with. Love is a beautiful liar.
Paula McLain
#83. about the biting white ants that moved in menacing ribbons over the plains, or the vipers or the sun, which sometimes pulsed so brightly it seemed to want to flatten you or eat you alive.
Paula McLain
#84. We were surrounded by people on the platform, but we were entirely alone.
Paula McLain
#85. reached behind me to adjust the stockings again. "Your mother doesn't like me." "She just doesn't want to lose me. That's how mothers are.
Paula McLain
#86. In some ways, it was as if nothing had changed. Our bodies knew each other so well we didn't have to think about how to move. But when it was over and we lay still, I felt a terrible sadness come down because I loved him as much as I ever did.
Paula McLain
#87. It was as if we'd pressed ourselves together until his bones passed through mine and we were the same person, ever so briefly.
Paula McLain
#88. though I leaned against him and tried to meet the kiss and to take it in, I couldn't quite feel it. I couldn't feel us. -
Paula McLain
#89. The way I see it, how can you really say you'll love a person longer than love lasts?
Paula McLain
#90. It had been a false spring, a lie like all the other lies, and I found myself wondering it it would ever really come.
Paula McLain
#91. Lower your voice," he warned, but I'd had enough. As he reached for my arm again, I wrenched myself free and nearly flattened Boy Long in the process. I hadn't even seen him. Glancing between Jock and me quickly, gauging the situation, Boy said, "Is everything all right
Paula McLain
#92. Whatever they were, they were living their lives, out there doing it, making their mistakes. Somehow I'd gotten stuck along the way [ ... ] and I didn't know how to free myself exactly.
Paula McLain
#93. I'd like it if you could love me for a little while at least.
Paula McLain
#94. You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through.
Paula McLain
#95. Books could be an incredible adventure. I stayed under my blanket and barely moved, and no one would have guessed how my mind raced and my heart soared with stories.
Paula McLain
#97. What's wrong with all of us, Bill? Can you tell me that?'
'Hell if I know', he said. 'We drink too much for starters. And we want too much, don't we?
Paula McLain
#98. Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual- if one things about it, it's really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn't think things through.
Paula McLain
#99. Who knows what anyone deserves? We like to play judge and jury, but we're all a rotten mess under our skins.
Paula McLain
#100. The accordion and the whores and the retching,' he said. 'That's our music.
Paula McLain
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