Quotes from Paula McLain

When the March rains fell over the plains and the ragged face of the escarpment, six million yellow flowers cracked open all at once. Red-and-white butterflies, the ones that looked like peppermint sticks, flashed in twists against the sparkling air. But

There was only the promise for the moment, as exhilarating as the feeling of champagne fizzing and dancing on my tongue.

The engine settled and breathed hard in place, like a small dragon home from war. Smoke chuffed and streamed out behind, marring the flat sky,

I remembered running for miles looking for an occupied warthog hole with arap Maina, and then stooping to crinkle paper outside the mouth of its den. This was what you did to call out the pig, the noise working to aggravate the animal in some way I didn't understand but rarely saw fail.

After years of pelting me with advice and restrictions, Emma had nothing left to say now. Nor did I. I could barely remember why I had fought her so much. She seemed just as lost as I was.

The hair on its haunches was like crisp black wire. Its mouth was frozen and clenched in death, bearing an expression of stubbornness I admired.

One day you might want to train for other owners, maybe even for Delamere. You've got the right base and you've the instincts." "Get my trainer's licence, you mean? Has a woman done that?" "Maybe not. But there aren't any rules against it." "I could try…. " I let the words trail away.

I'd managed to ignore how the ceremony would take away the boy I knew for ever and also the fierce warrior girl who had loved him. It already had. Those children were gone.

but none of it was real any more. We lived on a ghost farm.

The groom, Toombo, had brushed Pegasus's coat to a lacquer and now boosted me into the saddle. At two, Pegasus was massive already—a notch more than seventeen hands. I was tall, too—nearly six foot now—but I felt like a leaf in the saddle. In

There was to be a ngoma that night, as there always was for full moons—a tribal dance of the young Kikuyu men and women, up the high embankment at the far edge of the forest.

His departure had been months and months in coming, and still I wasn't nearly ready.

The surrender in it seemed to have cut new lines around his brown eyes.

I'm almost dizzy listening to him. A big part of me would give anything to finally put away Jenny's murderer, for all the same reasons Will has, plus my own. But he means the others, too, a massive undertaking by anyone's standards.

You're trampling my pasture." I

A red-jacketed porter hurried by me with a heavy steamer trunk, and I felt a rushing up of memory. At four, I had stared at the shrinking train that carried my mother away, black smoke rising, distance between us stretching by the moment.

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. I held my reel and felt the line list, and was back in Cologne with Ernest and Chink. Back at my first fish, knowing there wouldn't be any fish without this one, and no love without this first one either.

All I knew of men beyond farm life and work were the warm, confusing thoughts I sometimes had late at night now, about being touched or taken, thoughts that could make my cheeks hot even when I was alone in my hut.

Where was that fierce girl now? I didn't feel any whisper of her stirring in me. I also had no way of knowing how much I was yet supposed to weather—when my father might return, or even if he would. The

With this much loss, you begin to think it's in the blood, as if there's a dark magnet pulling the body in that direction—pulling, maybe, from the beginning.

Almost as soon as I arrived back at Njoro, it began to rain for the first time in over a year. The sky went black, splitting open with a deluge that didn't want to stop.

Only trouble sticks to me with any regularity…but I'm learning to think that can shape a person, too.

Before I was even halfway up the steep ridge, I heard the ngoma. Drums set the air vibrating and rang through the ground under my feet as if something were tunnelling powerfully in every direction at once.

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. I