Top 120 Paula McLain Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “I hope we’ll get lucky enough to grow old together.”

— Paula McLain

3. “You need to learn to live with yourself, not others,” he went on. “That’s the difficult part. When you learn to accept your own nature, it will start to feel peaceful, not frantic.”

— Paula McLain

4. “Not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved.”

— Paula McLain

5. “But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.”

— Paula McLain

6. “Don’t tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.”

— Paula McLain

7. “There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? – ERNEST HEMINGWAY, For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

— Paula McLain

8. “Maybe we are always all of our ages at once, like nesting matryoshka dolls?”

— Paula McLain

9. “I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.”

— Paula McLain

10. “Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.”

— Paula McLain

11. “I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.”

— Paula McLain

12. “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

13. “There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.”

— Paula McLain

14. “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

15. “Maybe that’s the secret to surviving all sorts of trouble, knowing who you are apart from it, I mean.”

— Paula McLain

16. “Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind.”

— Paula McLain

17. “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

18. “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

19. “We’re all of us afraid of many things, but if you make yourself smaller or let your fear confine you, then you really aren’t your own person at all – are you? The real question is whether or not you will risk what it takes to be happy.”

— Paula McLain

20. “Ernest once told me that the word paradise was a Persian words that meant walled garden. I knew then that he understood how necessary the promises we made to each other were to our happiness. You couldn’t have real freedom unless you knew were the walls were and tended to them. We could lean on the walls because they existed; they existed because we leaned on them.”

— Paula McLain

21. “Miwanzo is the word in Swahili for “beginnings.” But sometimes everything has to end first and the bottom drop out and every light fizzle and die before a proper beginning can come along.”

— Paula McLain

22. “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

23. “Ernest always said there was a season for everything. A season to love and be loved. To work and rest your bones and your spirit. To dream and to doubt, to fear and to fly. What season was this, then, if not one of ruin?”

— Paula McLain

24. “Some people feel out of place when they’re young, not because anything’s wrong with them, but because there’s something special that sets them apart. Something they haven’t figured out yet.”

— Paula McLain

25. “People belong to each other only as long as they both believe. He stopped believing.”

— Paula McLain

26. “My life was my life; I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.”

— Paula McLain

27. “I love you now more than I ever have in some ways and though different people view their marriage vows differently, I meant mine to the death. I’m ready to be yours forever if you must know it, but since you’ve fallen in love and want to marry someone else, I feel I have no choice but to move aside and let you do that.”

— Paula McLain

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Dogs are easy. If their tails are up and their eyes are soft, you’re in.”

— Paula McLain

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Anything and anyone could disappear on you, and you could disappear, too, if you didn’t have people around who really knew you. Who were there solidly, meeting you exactly where you stood when life grew stormy and terrifying. Who could find you when you were lost and couldn’t find yourself, not even in the mirror.”

— Paula McLain

34. “Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn’t. You’re either tied down or you’re not.”

— Paula McLain

35. “It’s not what you carry, but how you can learn to carry it. You need to heal yourself. Your child self too, Anna. Make room for her. Find a way to let her in.”

— Paula McLain

36. “I wish I could break into pieces,” I told him one night, just a week after I’d come back. “That would feel better somehow. Isn’t the worst when you can keep on walking and breathing and writing letters and going to the market and all the things you do when you’re alive, but really you’re blown apart?”

— Paula McLain

37. “The world needs an army of Wandas – strong, sarcastic, unafraid women who say what they think and act straightforwardly, without apology or permission. Women who roar instead of flinch.”

— Paula McLain

38. “Have you ever seen stars like this? You can’t have. They don’t make them like this anywhere in the world.” Above our heads, the sky was a brimming treasure box. Some of the stars seemed to want to pull free and leap down onto my shoulders – and though these were the only ones I had ever known, I believed Denys when he said they were the finest. I thought I might believe anything he said, in fact, even though we had just met. He had that in him.”

— Paula McLain

39. “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

40. “How some victims don’t have even a whisper of no inside them. Because they don’t believe the life they have is theirs to save.”

— Paula McLain

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn’t look up and didn’t stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work.”

— Paula McLain

44. “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

45. “Sometimes when you’re hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight.”

— Paula McLain

46. “Sometimes our dreams can be the most revealing things about us. Who we are when no one’s looking, who we believe we’re truly supposed to be, if we can get there.”

— Paula McLain

47. “If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I’ll be satisfied.”

— Paula McLain

48. “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

49. “The affair begun and ended, the damage done and the repairs under way, my battered heart on the mend. Because he would break my heart. I already knew that if nothing else.”

— Paula McLain

50. “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