Top 120 Paula McLain Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Sometimes when you’re hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight.”

— Paula McLain

52. “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

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

— Paula McLain

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

77. “The universe doesn’t do random.”

— Paula McLain

78. “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

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

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

— 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. “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

84. “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

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. “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

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

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

— Paula McLain

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.”

— Paula McLain

98. “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

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

— Paula McLain

100. “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