Top 100 Paula Mclain Quotes
#1. Things come that we never would have predicted for ourselves or even guessed at. And yet they change us for ever.
Paula McLain
#2. Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.
Paula McLain
#3. I'd never met anyone so vibrant or alive. He moved like light.
Paula McLain
#4. He had writing the way other people had religion
Paula McLain
#5. I didn't answer him and didn't open my eyes, and there was a moment of perfect vertigo, when I heard the whooshing of the surf again and felt I was part of it, swirling with it and also standing still, swept up an sewn into the sea and into the universe, but also very, very alone.
Paula McLain
#6. To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too-that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.
Paula McLain
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. It's important to test your nerve occasionally,' she said. 'It keeps you young.
Paula McLain
#14. If you're ready to make the mad dash I'm game.
Paula McLain
#15. My life was my life; I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.
Paula McLain
#16. Men hear what they like and invent the rest.
Paula McLain
#17. Sometimes when you're hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight.
Paula McLain
#19. People belong to each other only as long as they both believe. He stopped believing.
Paula McLain
#20. Those early days in Paris were nearly forty years behind him and yet, in the final pages he writes of Hadley, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.
Paula McLain
#21. I have fought for independence here, and freedom, too. More and more I find they're not at all the same thing.
Paula McLain
#22. 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
#23. I get suggestions all the time. People feel quite free at events or even on the street to tell me what they think I should be writing. What I've learned, though, is that this thing, this connection, has to be in place for me to be able to kind of launch into a world imaginatively.
Paula McLain
#24. What do you mean to do?'
'Make literary history, I guess.
Paula McLain
#25. What was more exciting than that? I could love him like crazy and work very hard to understand and support him, but I couldn't be fresh eyes and a fresh smile after five years. I couldn't be new.
Paula McLain
#26. 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
#27. I had never spent so much time by the sea, and hated the way the air thickened with salt and sat on my skin and made me always long for a bath. I was far more comfortable with dust.
Paula McLain
#28. 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
#29. I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.
Paula McLain
#30. I loved him for a full year and then, in one night, all my wishing came apart.
Paula McLain
#31. A new thing is good, though it be a sore place.
Paula McLain
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Then the rudder and elevator finally come to life, swinging her nose up, and she's left the earth - arrow straight. A butterfly after all.
Paula McLain
#35. 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
#36. This valley was more than my home. It beat in me like the drum of my own heart. Only
Paula McLain
#37. Dust billowed around us, creeping under our loose-tied handkerchiefs and into our noses and mouths. It was fine and silty, red as ochre or the brush-tailed fox,
Paula McLain
#38. And yet he could also be very charming, in a bookish, infinitely apologetic way.
Paula McLain
#39. Maybe that's the secret to surviving all sorts of trouble, knowing who you are apart from it, I mean.
Paula McLain
#40. 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
#41. would all trickle through my fingers like so much red dust, for as long as childhood lasted it was a heaven fitted
Paula McLain
#42. I've sometimes thought that being loved a little less than others can actually make a person, rather than ruin them.
Paula McLain
#43. At twenty-eight I'd had a handful of beaux, but had only been in love once, and that had been awful enough to make me doubt men and myself for a good long while.
Paula McLain
#44. He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, the tip flaring an angry red. Isn't love a beautiful goddamn liar?
Paula McLain
#45. And after a time, I stopped struggling even internally against the prescribed quietness.
Paula McLain
#46. 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
#48. I might just crawl under my bed and not come out until I'm old and doddering and can't remember feeling anything for anyone at all.
Paula McLain
#49. 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
#50. It was the end of Ernest's struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this unhappy.
Paula McLain
#51. People belong together to each other only as long as they believe. He stopped believing.
Paula McLain
#52. The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same,
Paula McLain
#53. I met the devil,' Ernest said, finishing his glass of wine, 'and he doesn't give a damn about art.
Paula McLain
#54. Baobab. Away in the distance I could see the cloud-softened
Paula McLain
#55. Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.
Paula McLain
#56. All her stories seemed to involve rowboats and ukuleles, full moons and campfires and grog. I was desperately jealous.
Paula McLain
#57. 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
#58. We'd given up trying to fool anyone, even ourselves.
Paula McLain
#59. I liked feeling strong and was uncomfortable knowing that had vanished whne he left. was my happiness so completely tied to him now that i could only feel like myself when he was near? i had no idea.
Paula McLain
#60. I wanted something grand and sweeping."
"The kind of love you find in novels?"
"Maybe. That makes me incredibly stupid, I suppose.
Paula McLain
#61. Because you can't chart a course around anything you're afraid of. You can't run from any part of yourself, and it's better that you can't. Sometimes I've thought it's only our challenges that sharpen us, and change us, too - a
Paula McLain
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Proper learning isn't just useful in society, Beryl. It can be wonderfully yours, a thing to have and keep just for you.
Paula McLain
#67. Why is it every other person you meet says they're an artist? A real artist doesn't need to gas on about it, he doesn't have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.
Paula McLain
#68. We stood there, locked and lovely as statues in a garden.
Paula McLain
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. and was there for the birth, on 25 February
Paula McLain
#73. Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn't. You're either tied down or you're not.
Paula McLain
#74. 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
#75. Did you ever think it could be like this? The way we're happening to each other?
Paula McLain
#76. Searching out something important and going astray look exactly the same for a while, in fact.
Paula McLain
#77. 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
#78. You're making something new. Don't forget that when it starts to hurt.
Paula McLain
#79. They sat in the cafes with their fresh faces and long lovely legs and waited for something outrageous to happen.
Paula McLain
#80. 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
#81. He and I had already had our time, and though it was still very close and real to me, as beautiful and poignant as any place on a map, it was, in truth, another time - another country.
Paula McLain
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Because it's not always easy to know how to live.
Paula McLain
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. But when Bumby nursed, his fist clutching the fabric of my robe, his eyes soft and bottomless and locked on mine, as if I were the very heart of his universe, I couldn't help but melt into him.
Paula McLain
#89. he grinned a grin that began in his eyes and went everywhere at once. It was devastating.
Paula McLain
#90. Walk through your sorrow, my daughter, it hardly matters as long as you walk to where you want to be.
Paula McLain
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. I felt a sense of anticipation of being on the verge of something interesting.
Paula McLain
#96. I loved the deep smell of the horses and the track itself and the noises of the happy crowd taking its luck as it came.
Paula McLain
#97. Are you always this wise, Ruth?"
"Only when it comes to other people's lives.
Paula McLain
#98. This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.
Paula McLain
#99. There was nowhere to go in the house to escape my dark thoughts.
Paula McLain
#100. How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in.
Paula McLain
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