Top 120 Paula McLain Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.”

— Paula McLain

102. “We each have to make our choices, and then find a way to live with them. And if we can’t, well then, that’s when we know something has to change.”

— Paula McLain

103. “He wanted them both, but there was no having everything, and love couldn’t help him now. Nothing could help him but bravery, and what was that anyhow?”

— Paula McLain

104. “Beginning are important, too, darling. You should be patient with life.”

— Paula McLain

105. “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

106. “Who, when you got right down to it, knew a goddamned thing about love?”

— Paula McLain

107. “The very rich only admire themselves.”

— Paula McLain

108. “All the distances I had traveled, trying to be myself, didn’t matter here, where nothing ever changed. Not the mahogany furniture or the art or the books in their placement on the shelves. Not the eggshell sheen on the walls, or the quality of light coming through the stained-glass window on the landing. This was the light of childhood. I was all the ages I had ever been.”

— Paula McLain

109. “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

110. “You can take a cub from the savannah as they have, and raise it like a pet if you like. In a cage, as some do, or running free like Paddy. You can feed it fresh meat so it never learns to hunt and brush its coat so it carries a human smell wherever it goes – but know that what you’ve done is twist something natural into something else. And you can never trust on unnatural thing. – Charles Clutterbuck.”

— Paula McLain

111. “My mind knew it was all finished, but the heart never knows, or if it does, it does only at the very last possible moment.”

— Paula McLain

112. “I want to be passionate about things and feed my mind and travel the world. I’d rather be darkly and dangerously happy, like living on a knife’s edge, than lose my way and forget my nature.”

— Paula McLain

113. “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

114. “Young writers, they’re almost always autobiographical, even when they don’t mean to be.”

— Paula McLain

115. “Sorry was maybe the loneliest feeling of all, I understood, because it only brought you back to yourself.”

— Paula McLain

116. “That was the thing about experience. It took distant strangers and made them a family. A family of one moment. There was no other way to see it, even as we scattered to the wind.”

— Paula McLain

117. “I wasn’t raised to acknowledge my own feelings, let alone stick up for myself like that.”

— Paula McLain

118. “Because everyone wants to be looked for, whether they realize it or not.”

— Paula McLain

119. “If you think about it, most of us have very little choice about what we’re going to become or who we’re going to love, or what place on earth chooses us, becoming home.”

— Paula McLain

120. “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.” She was referring to Jock, but her words made me think of other things, too. “Are you happy, Karen?” “Not yet. But I mean to be.”

— Paula McLain

121. “What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?”

— Paula McLain

122. “Your biological parents give you their genes, the map of your physical self. But whoever raises you makes you who you are, for better or for worse. Family dynamics are acted out, not built in, though someday scientists might prove otherwise.”

— Paula McLain

123. “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. – Frederick Buechner.”

— Paula McLain

124. “Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human, Eden used to say. I didn’t know what she meant then. My heart had been broken lots of times, and I was supposed to say thank you? Now, all these years later, I’m at least starting to see that she was really talking about the whole journey. That it’s impossible to be alive and not get hurt sometimes, not if you’re doing it right.”

— Paula McLain

125. “You know, we don’t always understand what we’re living inside of, or how it will matter. We can guess all we want and prepare, too, but we never know how it’s going to turn out.”

— Paula McLain

126. “In my years as a detective and particularly with Searchlight, I’ve learned so much about cycles of violence in family systems. But cycles of silence can be just as dangerous – and they repeat through generations with startling consistency. A mother’s dieting becomes her daughter’s obsessive control over bonsai trees. Secret glaring infidelity becomes wordless assent and then emptiness. Cameron was exposed to all of this. Silver spoon or no, Emily had fed her powerlessness.”

— Paula McLain

127. “We can only go to the limits of ourselves – I’ve learned that if nothing else. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we’re not good for anyone. – Beryl Markham.”

— Paula McLain

128. “What we can’t bear to know or feel, we often find a way to hide from ourselves, and hide well.”

— Paula McLain

129. “It’s not what you carry, but how you can learn to carry it.”

— Paula McLain

130. “We were married at All Saints on a sun-shocked Wednesday in October, two weeks before my seventeenth birthday. The legal marrying age was eighteen then, but my father thought I was old enough, and that seemed good enough for me.”

— Paula McLain

131. “Dreams can tell us a lot of things,” I go on. “They’re a kind of map of the inner life. Sometimes thinking of who we might someday be is the only way we can get through the reality of who we actually are.”

— Paula McLain