Quotes from Paula McLain

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.

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

Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn't. You're either tied down or you're not.

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.

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.

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.

I hope we'll get lucky enough to grow old together.

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

But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.

The way I see it, how can you really say you'll love a person longer than love lasts?

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

But in the end, fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.

Not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved

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

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.

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.

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

You are everything good and straight and fine and true—and I see that so clearly now, in the way you've carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You've changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am. That's one thing I've learned from this. No one you love is ever truly lost.

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.

He was such an enigma, really - fierce and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn't one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true.

Not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved

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.

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

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.