Top 120 Paula McLain Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Let’s just say I’ve developed a theory that only the vanished truly leave their mark. And I still don’t feel I’ve sorted it out. Maybe we never do survive our families.”

— Paula McLain

52. “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

53. “I didn’t want to be a sweet boy’s sweet girlfriend. I wanted to be Fawn’s equal, the kind of girl who stood up for herself and took care of business, who cut guys loose when it was required.”

— Paula McLain

54. “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

55. “The way I see it, how can you really say you’ll love a person longer than love lasts?”

— Paula McLain

56. “We stood there, locked and lovely as statues in a garden.”

— Paula McLain

57. “Searching out something important and going astray look exactly the same for a while, in fact.”

— Paula McLain

58. “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

59. “Sometimes the only antidote for pain is more of it.”

— Paula McLain

60. “I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.”

— Paula McLain

61. “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. And whatever suffering has come is the necessary cost of such wonders, as Karen once said, the beautiful thrashing we do when we live.”

— Paula McLain

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.”

— Paula McLain

66. “Perhaps Ernest’s marriage meant, as I’d said, that there was no cliff to fling myself from. But what did that matter when love itself was an ocean, and you could drown in even a teacup of it?”

— Paula McLain

67. “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

68. “You on the train and me here and everything emptier now you’re gone. Tell me, are you real?”

— Paula McLain

69. “Is it nice? It’s hard to care about people. You end up fretting all the time and feeling helpless, hoping they’ll live forever. Only no one does.”

— Paula McLain

70. “We can only go to the limits of ourselves. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we’re not good for anyone.”

— Paula McLain

71. “He talks about the gift of being lost in the woods. I’ve always found that comforting, somehow. That maybe you have to be truly lost before you can find yourself again.”

— Paula McLain

72. “She was also incredibly confident, with a way of moving and talking that communicated that she didn’t need anyone to tell her she was beautiful or worthwhile.”

— Paula McLain

73. “I have fought for independence here, and freedom, too. More and more I find they’re not at all the same thing.”

— Paula McLain

74. “We were both straining to bend and compromise for the other. But that was what marriage was about, wasn’t it?”

— Paula McLain

75. “That’s the problem with going into the world, isn’t it? You actually have to face things you find you don’t want to know.”

— Paula McLain

76. “He wanted everything there was to have, and more than that.”

— Paula McLain

77. “I’d never met anyone so vibrant or alive. He moved like light.”

— Paula McLain

78. “And sometimes I think there isn’t anything to us but our mistakes.”

— Paula McLain

79. “All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.”

— Paula McLain

80. “You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through.”

— Paula McLain

81. “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

82. “The people we love never leave us, Anna. You know that already. That’s what I mean by spirit. I mean love.”

— Paula McLain

83. “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

84. “The universe doesn’t do random.”

— Paula McLain

85. “I was just as terrified that even if he did finally choose me, our love wouldn’t be the lasting kind.”

— Paula McLain

86. “You’re making something new. Don’t forget that when it starts to hurt.”

— Paula McLain

87. “Flying demanded more courage and faith than I actually possessed, and it wanted my best, my whole self. I would have to work very hard to be any good at it at all, and be more than a little mad to be great, to give my life over to it. But that’s just what I meant to do.”

— Paula McLain

88. “Even when other things come in loud, we have to keep choosing each other. That’s marriage. You can’t only say the words once and think they’ll stick. You have to say them over and over, and then live them with all you’ve got.”

— Paula McLain

89. “I’ve sometimes thought that being loved a little less than others can actually make a person, rather than ruin them.”

— Paula McLain

90. “On safari, I saw Denys in sharper relief than I ever had. He had an infallible compass, and a way of seeing everything as if he knew it would never be there exactly the same again. More than anyone I’d known, 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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “Nothing hurts if you don’t let it.”

— Paula McLain

94. “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

95. “I was falling in love, and it was wonderful, and it was awful.”

— Paula McLain

96. “Places change us, don’t they? Sometimes more than we can even guess.”

— Paula McLain

97. “People like what they know. It’s human nature.”

— Paula McLain

98. “For seven years Ernest had been not so much in my heart and mind as in my very blood cells. And now I would have to learn to live without him. How? Where could one learn to do that kind of amputation, and walk away alive, and still be the same person?”

— Paula McLain

99. “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

100. “It feels important to go everywhere one can and see all there is to see and try to understand it.”

— Paula McLain